Deploying OpenStack is NOT Difficult

There are too many articles around at the moment claiming that OpenStack is difficult to set up, and too many vendors claiming the only answer is consulting.

Yes, consulting can be important to get the business side of your private cloud worked out, but setting up OpenStack doesn't need to be difficult, when you have a distribution that's main purpose is ease-of-deployment in enterprise environments.

Here are some factoids about SUSE OpenStack Cloud:

• It was the first enterprise OpenStack distro
• SUSE introduced the concept of "distro" for OpenStack
• It is actually a distro that can be set up by normal people - not just an invitation to a consulting engagement by a vendor
• It is the only distro to ever win Intel's "Rule the Stack" competition for ease-of-installation-and- management (3 times in a row, and sometimes when no-one else was able to complete the task)
• It is the only distro that supports KVM and Xen and VMware and HyperV and Docker and zVM – yes! you can even send workloads to mainframes!
• The deployment tool can deploy SUSE Linux Enterprise and HyperV/Windows Server as compute nodes.
• Installation of SUSE Enterprise Storage (powered by Ceph) is integrated into the deployment tool
• The deployment tool will communicate with your existing infrastructure if you want: plugins make it easy to include your favourite storage system or converged networking
• It is the distro used by some of the well-known OpenStack users
• HA deployment is included with a couple of extra clicks
• SUSE's fleet management tool, SUSE Manager, can be easily integrated into the cloud infrastructure so that new compute/storage/etc nodes automatically get patch/update/security/configuration management
• SUSE's template creation tool, SUSE Studio, can be used to set up the VM's to offer to end users & directly add them into the OpenStack image repository.

Given that ease-of-install has been the hallmark of SUSE OpenStack Cloud since day one, it seems a shame that everyone seems to think it's difficult when it doesn't have to be – it should be a piece of cake.

Some links:

FIS-ASP deploys in one day:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdlUIdYwQU

BMW OpenStack + Ceph case study: https://www.susecon.com/doc/2015/sessions/CAS19964.pdf

SAP using SUSE including OpenStack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLkPzFB1m_w

More (including downloads) at: https://suse.com/cloud