The cloud is the future, and now is the time to start learning more about how you can use OpenStack to solve your organization's IT infrastructure needs. Fortunately, we're here to help with that.

Every month, we compile the very best of recently published how-tos, guides, tutorials, and tips into this handy collection. And don't forget, for much more information beyond these snippets, the official documentation for OpenStack is always a great place to look.

First up this month is a look at importing and converting disk images for OpenStack Glance directly in Ceph. Writes Sébastian Han, "Ceph, to work in optimal circumstances, requires the usage of RAW images. However, it is painful to upload RAW images in Glance because it takes a while. Let see how we can make our life easier."

Next, let's take a dive into dealing with attached storage volumes. What happens when a launched instance gets deleted but due to some, erm, strangeness in your system, the disk image attached to it remains? How do you go about getting rid of that disk? Learn what to do in this guide to deleting root volumes attached to non-existent images.

Are you an OpenStack contributor? This tip is for you. Have you ever wondered how to compare two different patchsets in Gerrit? Sylvain Bauza shares a little bit about how his review process works.

Most datacenters are a mixed environment of old and new, with different applications at different places in their lifecycle, and different support tools underlying them. It's not uncommon to need to support a variety of different hypervisors. Fortunately, OpenStack can handle that. Learn how to deploy OpenStack in a multi-hypervisor environment.

Your application layer may be stuck on a closed source operating system, but that doesn’t mean you can’t run it in your open source datacenter with OpenStack. If you need to build a Windows image to use with OpenStack, here's how. Bonus tip: want to do the same thing with FreeBSD? There's a solution to that too. Of course many Linux distributions, including the recently-released Fedora 21, are OpenStack-ready on day one.

Okay, one more for those OpenStack core developers. Setting up unit test suites with Python virtual environments is a common practice, but it can be a time consuming one. Daniel P. Berrangé writes up a way to do faster rebuilds for Python virtualenv trees.

Our final tutorial this month isn't just a single guide, but rather a collection of helpful posts that detail the process of deploying OpenStack through a variety of different methods. Edmund Haselwanter takes you through deploying OpenStack with Chef-server, Chef-zero, RPC, Fuel, and my favorite, with RDO Packstack.

That's it for this month. 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!