For about a year now, I have been playing with OpenStack cloud platform off and on. Always, just running it on my laptop or in some limited virtual environment. But last week, my manager asked another colleague and I to deploy OpenStack at work on a few computer to play with some ideas.
It was so much fun to be finally be able to play with it on several machines. Because our tests were very promising after a few days, we did have some hiccup due to our inexperience and faulty hardware. But now, we will be getting some new servers and blades to play with.
A buddy of mine recently asked me to setup a CentOS server for him. Well, little does he know, he will be getting a server in a VM running in a small cloud deployment at my home. He is remote, and often uses my server, so since he won’t be seeing the actual machine, I will get him what he wants and ton of flexibility from doing a cloud.
I love OpenStack, but it is a bit of a pain and a usuable deployment needs a few machines. I will be deploying CloudStack (from Apache) for my small cloud at home. Mostly due to its simplicity and management. What I should say, it would be easier to deploy using the UShareSoft CloudStack distribution.