%BOOK_ENTITIES; ]> Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds can be a complex thing to build, and by definition they have a plethora of options, which often lead to confusion for even experienced admins who are newcomers to building cloud platforms. The goal for this runbook is to provide a straightforward set of instructions to get you up and running with CloudStack with a minimum amount of trouble.

This runbook will focus on building a CloudStack cloud using KVM with CentOS 6.2 with NFS storage on a flat layer-2 network utilizing layer-3 network isolation (aka Security Groups), and doing it all on a single piece of hardware. KVM, or Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a virtualization technology for the Linux kernel. KVM supports native virtualization atop processors with hardware virtualization extensions. Security Groups act as distributed firewalls that control access to a group of virtual machines.

Before we actually get to installing CloudStack, we'll start with installing our base operating system, and then configuring that to act as an NFS server for several types of storage. We'll install the management server, download the systemVMs, and finally install the agent software. Finally we'll spend a good deal of time configuring the entire cloud in the CloudStack web interface.

To complete this runbook you'll need the following items: At least one computer which supports hardware virtualization. The CentOS 6.2 x86_64 minimal install CD A /24 network with the gateway being at xxx.xxx.xxx.1, no DHCP should be on this network and none of the computers running CloudStack may have a dynamic address. Copy of CloudStack 3.0.2 for RHEL and CentOS 6.2