What a mouthful, the title that is. This following series of posts gives a near idiots guide, death by screen shot, step by step approach of a recent Helion OpenStack 2.1 installation that includes Helion Ceph as the integrated backend storage for Cinder, Glance and Nova. There’s a deliberately ridiculous amount of information here as one of my mum’s New Year’s resolutions is to build an OpenStack cloud. This is a ‘warts and all’ blog post – I’ve included all my errors/mistakes/typos deliberately, in the interest of hopefully saving others from similar challenges.

Please ensure that you follow HPE’s official documentation when performing ALL installations. These notes are purely a point in time view of what an installation looks like (or at least my style of installation).

Passphrases were used with the SSH keys and all the sensitive Ansible data was encrypted using the HPE provided mechanisms – why? Because most of you will probably never bother to do it in your test environments but may be curious as to what impact it has on the installation.

I’ve broken down the installation process – due to the overall size of the blog – into the following sections:

• Prerequisites – laptop or workstation setup and a step by step server bios configuration (2-of-8)
• Helion Lifecycle Manager installation – we’ll be using a combined Cloud Controller1 and HLM node (3-of-8)
• Helion OS Cloud Model Configuration – tuning the example configuration files to match your cloud requirement (4-of-8)
• Helion OS Cloud Deployment – you did all the hard work in the previous steps, it’s coffee time (5-of-8)
• Helion Ceph Integration (6-of-8)
• Helion OS Installation Verification – Prove it actually works  – to be continued (7-of-8)
• The Out Takes – all my ‘deliberate mistakes’ during the installation process (8-of-8)

Please remember this is all performed under laboratory conditions with lots of expensive hardware – Don’t try this at home – unless you too have lots of expensive hardware.

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