OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing project that is free open source software released under the terms of the Apache License.

The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects that control large pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

The original guide for this project is hosted on StackGeek. You can also view and fork the guide right here on Github.

Start your OpenStack setup by installing Ubuntu Server 12.04LTS on the servers you want included in your OpenStack cluster. OpenStack can be installed on a single computer and nodes may be added at a later date to increase instance hosting capacity.

Login to your box via ssh and install git with aptitude. We'll become root and do an update first:

aptitude update
apt-get install git

Now checkout the StackGeek OpenStack setup scripts from Github:

git clone git://github.com/StackGeek/openstackgeek.git
cd openstackgeek/folsom