Deploying OpenStack

Chapter 5. Obtaining Nova

Nova is distributed from several sources in many different packaging formats. As it is a relatively new project, it lacks the installation ease and universal portability of more established open source projects like Apache Web Server. As such, it is not easily installable on every operating system distribution without significant administrative configuration. In this chapter, we will help you decide which version of the OpenStack code base is best suited to your deployment needs and show you how to obtain that version in your preferred packaging.

Nova Versions and Packaging

As Nova is a fast-moving and relatively young project, we need to make some decisions about the codebase that we want to use. There are two major decisions here:

• What version do we want to use?

• What form of packaging do we want to use to deploy Nova?

To adequately answer these questions, you need to ask yourself two tough questions:

• How proficient am I with Python development, system administration, and Linux packaging?

• How much stability am I willing to sacrifice to get the latest features?

To answer the proficiency question, you will need to honestly examine your skills across not just programming, but also system administration. If you don’t utilize the packaged versions of Nova, you will need to understand how Python applications are built and their dependent packages. If you want to use newer, non-production versions of the code, it is possible that you will run into bugs that you will ...