Rackspace Private Cloud, and OpenStack on its own, can be a formidable set of software to install. Rackspace Private Cloud uses Chef to deploy OpenStack, and while Chef itself has a high learning curve, its use does make deploying OpenStack easier and more scalable.
Despite this, I find a lot of installation confusion comes from how to setup the virtual machines. How many CPUs do I allocate? How much RAM do I allocate? How much storage should there be? How many NICs do I need and on what networks? Many people may give up at this point or attempt an install with incorrect virtual machine configurations which ruins their experience. However, Vagrant by Hashicorp makes it very easy to define the virtual machines and the necessary Rackspace Private Cloud installation steps all within a simple text file. In this presentation/hands-on lab, I will be going through how I took Rackspace's Private Cloud deployment instructions and incorporated them into a Vagrantfile to make spinning up a multi-node virtual machine based Rackspace Private Cloud on your workstation as easy as typing vagrant up". "
