Well I managed to screw up my deployment some how. I’ve been trying to figure out why I can only use 50GB of space on each compute node and in the process of trying to increase that space it seems I have broken something. I’m not sure what I did, but I can’t use my main compute node now. It seems that the database thinks it should have less memory than it does. I would try and fix this, but I’ve also discovered why I can only use 50GB and I think it’ll be easier to fix that issue by nuking my stack and starting over.

So it seems that the root of my storage problem is the way CentOS 7 minimal automatically partitions the disk during installation. CentOS uses LVM by default and it creates a slightly funny partition table. The root folder is on a volume with only 50GB of space. That’s where the limitation is coming from in OpenStack. The rest of the space gets allocated to a volume for the home directory. For a normal system this may be more than adequate, but for something like OpenStack I need all the space to be given to /var/lib for KVM to use for instance volume space.

This whole project has just been one giant learning experience, both for deploying and managing OpenStack, and managing CentOS systems as well. So now I’m going to nuke my stack and start over, again. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass (a REAL pain in the ass) but I’m going to save some of the config files from this deployment to make the lengthy configuration portion a little less lengthy.

The second time I deployed things went much more smoothly and a lot quicker, so hopefully the same is true for what will now be my third time deploying vanilla OpenStack from scratch. I must say that using a scripted installer for a development stack like this would likely be much faster, but since I plan to deploy a production stack very soon this is good practice. With all the information I’ve gathered from these deployments a production deployment should go much easier than if I had only used PackStack or something for this development environment.

But on to knocking over my blocks so I can build again!