A workshop on OpenStack was conducted on Saturday, December 1, 2012 at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR), Pune, India. Both theory and lab sessions were organized for the students. I started the proceedings using Perry Myers’s presentation on “Introduction and Overview of OpenStack for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Clouds” for the Essex release. The various building blocks of OpenStack with their functionality was explained. An overall big picture of the architecture was presented to them with illustrations.

The OpenStack Lab Guide was then given to the participants to setup their own OpenStack private cloud. Some of them had brought their own laptops, while others used the Fedora machines in the labs. We started by setting up the Keystone service, and adding users for authentication. The Glance service was then installed, and configured. A Fedora 17 and cirros image were then imported into Glance. The Nova service was then setup, and a SSH keypair was created for testing.

The Horizon dashboard user interface was used to start a virtual machine instance. Using ssh and the created keypair, we were able to login to the virtual machine and use it. curl was used to test the different REST API on the running stack. I also showed them simple Python examples to demonstrate the OpenStack APIs. As a final presentation for the day, I gave an introduction on libvirtd, and KVM.

Thanks to Manoj Aswani for working with me in organizing this workshop. Thanks also to Perry Myers and Mark McLoughlin for permission to use their presentation.