Stack-in-a-Box: Try before you mkfs

Run DevStack from a RAM disk to give it a whirl before making the commitment to install it. We'll cover booting from a USB drive or over the network via PXE. We'll even thow in configuring a home router to handle the PXE boot. You will need a minimum of 3GB for both of these configurations as the RAM disk itself is 2GB.

USB Boot

This guide covers the creation of a bootable USB drive. Your computer BIOS must support booting from USB.

PXE Boot

This guide covers the installation of OpenWRT on a home router and configuring it as a PXE server, plus the creation of the boot images and PXE support files.

Install DevStack

Grab the latest version of DevStack via https:

sudo apt-get install git -y
git clone https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git
cd devstack

Prepare the Boot RAMdisk

Pick your boot method and follow the guide to prepare to build the RAM disk and set up the boot process:

• USB boot
• PXE boot

Fire It Up

• Boot the computer into the RAM disk. The details will vary from machine to machine but most BIOSes have a method to select the boot device, often by pressing F12 during POST.
• Select 'DevStack' from the Boot Menu.
• Log in with the 'stack' user and 'pass' password.
• Create devstack/localrc if you wish to change any of the configuration variables. You will probably want to at least set the admin login password to something memorable rather than the default 20 random characters:

  ADMIN_PASSWORD=openstack

• Fire up OpenStack!

  ./run.sh

• See the processes running in screen:

  screen -x

• Connect to the dashboard at http://<ip-address>/