We looked at the components that make up an OpenStack installation in the previous chapter; let's now take a look at what's involved in installing and configuring these components. In this chapter, we'll walk through the installation and configuration of a community-supported distribution of OpenStack called RDO using an installation tool called Packstack.

Manual installation and configuration of OpenStack involves installing, configuring, and registering each of the components we covered in the previous chapter and also multiple databases and a messaging system. It's a very involved, repetitive, error-prone, and sometimes-confusing process. Fortunately, there are a few distributions that include tools to automate this installation and configuration process.

One such distribution is the RDO distribution. RDO, as a name, doesn't officially mean anything. It's just the name of Red Hat's community-supported distribution of OpenStack. Red Hat takes the upstream OpenStack...