uid-0: October 2014

Red Hat distributes OpenStack by two ways:
- RDO, the community - supported distribution which is made like Fedora is;
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, the commercially - supported distribution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

What does the RDO stand for?

Let the RDO's FAQs explain :-):

If you prefer, you can think of it as 'Really Darned Obvious', representing our view that it should be easy to deploy an OpenStack cloud using RDO. Or, possibly, 'Ridiculously Dedicated OpenStackers', representing our OpenStack engineering team and their passion about making this stuff work.

RDO is meant to be deployed on any Red Hat - based Linux, including CentOS. If you want to just try OpenStack and you don't need the commercial support, your choice may be RDO. Otherwise, I would recommend to use RHEL OpenStack Platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course.

The simplest deployment of RDO can be done by the "all-in-one" method of the installer what is named PackStack. For more complex deployments the recommended way is a use of other tools like Foreman or doing even manual installation of the OpenStack services.

I had made the decision to test how the PackStack method works on CentOS 7. The PackStack tool is very dependent on the configuration of yum repositories, so before we use it on CentOS, we have to make sure that the repositories are available and set up properly. In addition to this, it's better if during the installation we have SELinux turned off. PackStack will install special SELinux policy by the package with name openstack-selinux, so after installation we may turn the SELinux on.

The RDO Quickstart document is not telling much about the additional steps, so this blog post may be useful for anyone who would like to install OpenStack by PackStack on CentOS.

Any substantive comments, questions or errata are very welcome.

So, the recipe is:

1. Check the CentOS yum repository configuration and update the CentOS packages.
2. Install yum repositories for the RDO installation:
yum install -y https://rdo.fedorapeople.org/rdo-release.rpm

3. Install the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository:
yum install -y epel-relase-7-2
4. Install the PackStack package:
yum install -y openstack-packstack
5. Enable the Puppet repositories:
yum-config-manager --enable puppetlabs*
6. Turn SELinux "off" (Permissive Mode):
setenforce 0
7. Install OpenStack "all-in-one" and tell PackStack to not forget about the EPEL repository for the dependencies:
packstack --allinone --use-epel=y