Use the cloud to build the cloud! Use your cloud to launch new versions of OpenStack in about 5 minutes. When you break it, start over! The VMs launched in the cloud will be slow as they are running in QEMU (emulation), but their primary use is testing OpenStack development and operation. Speed not required.
DevStack should run in any virtual machine running a supported Ubuntu or Fedora release. It needs at least 1.2Gb of RAM in order to launch an m1.tiny VM; if you leave out Swift, 1Gb will do.
If the cloud service has an image with cloud-init pre-installed, use it. You can
get one from Ubuntu's Daily Build
site if necessary. This will enable you to launch VMs with userdata that installs
everything at boot time.
If you are directly using a hypervisor like Xen, kvm or VirtualBox you can manually kick off the script below in a bare-bones server installation.
The userdata script grabs the latest version of DevStack via git, creates a minimal
localrc file and kicks off stack.sh.
#!/bin/sh apt-get update apt-get install -qqy git git clone https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git cd devstack echo ADMIN_PASSWORD=password > localrc echo MYSQL_PASSWORD=password >> localrc echo RABBIT_PASSWORD=password >> localrc echo SERVICE_PASSWORD=password >> localrc echo SERVICE_TOKEN=tokentoken >> localrc ./stack.sh
Using a hypervisor directly, launch the VM and either manually perform the steps in the script above or copy it into the VM.
At this point you should be able to access the dashboard. Launch VMs and if you give them floating IPs access those VMs from other machines on your network.
One interesting use case is for developers working on a VM on their laptop. Once
stack.sh has completed once, all of the pre-requisite packages are installed
in the VM and the source trees checked out. Setting OFFLINE=True in
localrc enables stack.sh to run multiple times without an Internet
connection. DevStack, making hacking at the lake possible since 2012!