Hi Dave,

I would suggest getting a minimal deployment up and running with each environment, before making your choice.

For Kolla Ansible, you can follow the quickstart documentation to get a single node deployment up and running: https://docs.openstack.org/kolla-ansible/yoga/user/quickstart.html

If you also need bare metal provisioning capabilities for your control & compute nodes, as well as more advanced host configuration, you might consider Kayobe, which builds on top of Kolla Ansible. Here is a guide to building up the configuration for a single node deployment: https://docs.openstack.org/kayobe/latest/configuration/scenarios/all-in-one/index.html

Regards,
Mark

On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 16:05, Dave Hall <kdhall@binghamton.edu> wrote:
Hello,

My question is about OpenStack-Ansible vs. Kolla-Ansible.  While I am sensitive to the effort that has been put into both of these projects, what I really need right now is the most fool-proof way to deploy and manage a small production cluster for academic instructional use.

(BTW, I do understand that there are other differences between Kolla and regular openstack.)

I have been working for a couple months with OpenStack-Ansible to deploy a small (3-node) Xena test cluster on VirtualBox VMs in preparation for a larger deployment on real hardware - 6 to 10 nodes.  My VirtualBox deployment has been:

Debian 11 deployment, Debian 10 infra, compute, and storage nodes

It has been slow going, at least partially due to some issues and limitations with VirtualBox (and Vagrant early on).  However, deploying a test cluster on VMs still seems preferable to just diving into deployment on real hardware and going through multiple scrubs/reinstalls.

I've recently seen more posts in the list about Kolla-Ansible.  So, as a 'beginner', should I shift and look at Kolla-Ansible, or should I stay the course and continue with Openstack-Ansible?  What are the pros and cons of each?

For that matter, is there some other deployment mechanism that would be more fool-proof for a first-timer?  Although I'm more familiar with Ansible than the other tools (Chef, Puppet, etc.) I'm most interested in how to get a cluster up and running regardless of the underlying tools.

Thanks.

-Dave

--
Dave Hall
Binghamton University
kdhall@binghamton.edu