If you're working in system administration today, you need to learn about OpenStack. Whether you're a seasoned IT pro looking to leverage cloud technology in your organization or just starting out in your career and hoping to put some experience under your belt, we're here to help.

Once a month, Opensource.com brings together the best how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips into a single package to help you learn what you need to know. Need more? Visit the official documentation for OpenStack for additional details and debugging hints.

Unit tests are an important part of the software development process, and it's important to be able to set up virtual environments to run these tests. The OpenStack way is to use tox. Are you developing code for OpenStack and want to know how to test it out? Check out this guide to running OpenStack tests with tox.

Sometimes, no matter your best efforts, bad things happen to your virtual machines. When it comes back up, it's often important to other machines on the network that it can be found in the same place. What's the best way to make sure that happens? Consider this tutorial on rebuilding an OpenStack instance and keeping the same fixed IP.

The OpenStack documentation team has been switching their preferred format from DocBook format to reStructuredText (RST). Interested in contributing to docs, but not quite sure how the two are different, or how to use the correct markup to keep the same conventions in place? Here's a cheat sheet which will make your life much easier.

Heat templates are the OpenStack-native way of orchestrating things, and TripleO uses them to deploy OpenStack using the OpenStack-native APIs. But even the best cloud administrator doesn't always create a template which runs right the first time. Here's a great guide from Red Hat's Steve Hardy on how to debug your templates.

Network topology can be confusing. Here are three guides for setting up distributed virtual routing for east/west routing, working with floating IPs, and source NAT.

Following on the networking theme, what happens when you need to connect a single virtual machine to multiple networks? Here's a great walkthrough of creating a new network for a dual-NIC virtual machine.

Do you use VirtualBox as a virtualization solution on your personal computer or laptop? Did you know there's a driver for OpenStack which enables it to work with VirtualBox? Check out this page, which will walk you through the basics of what is supported and how to use the driver with a DevStack environment for testing and developing components for OpenStack.

That's all for this month. Be sure to check out our complete OpenStack tutorials collection for more great guides and hints. And if we missed your favorite new guide or resource, let us know in the comments!