docs/qig/en-US/Overview.xml

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<chapter id="chap-qig-Overview">
  <title>Overview</title>
    <para>
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds can be a complex thing to build, 
    and by definition they have a plethora of options, which often lead to confusion
    for even experienced admins who are newcomers to building cloud platforms. 
    The goal for this runbook is to provide a straightforward set of instructions 
    to get you up and running with CloudStack with a minimum amount of trouble. 
    </para>
    <section id="sect-qig-Overview-What_building">
      <title>What exactly are we building?</title>
      <para>
      This runbook will focus on building a CloudStack cloud using KVM with 
      CentOS 6.3 with NFS storage on a flat layer-2 network utilizing 
          layer-3 network isolation (aka Security Groups), and doing it all
          on a single piece of hardware.   
      </para>
      <para> 
        KVM, or Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a virtualization technology
        for the Linux kernel. KVM supports native virtualization atop 
        processors with hardware virtualization extensions. 
      </para>
      <para>
        Security Groups act as distributed firewalls that control access
        to a group of virtual machines.
      </para>
    </section>
    <section id="sect-qig-Overview-hilevel">
      <title>High level overview of the process</title>
      <para> 
        Before we actually get to installing CloudStack, we'll start with 
        installing our base operating system, and then configuring that to act
        as an NFS server for several types of storage. We'll install the 
        management server, download the systemVMs, and finally install the agent
        software. Finally we'll spend a good deal of time configuring the entire
        cloud in the CloudStack web interface. 
      </para>
    </section>    
    <section id="sect-qig-Overview-prereqs">
      <title>Prerequisites</title>
        <para>
          To complete this runbook you'll need the following items:
          <orderedlist>
            <listitem>
              <para>
                At least one computer which supports hardware virtualization. 
              </para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
              <para>
                The 
                <ulink url="http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/6.3/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.3-x86_64-minimal.iso">
                CentOS 6.3 x86_64 minimal install CD
                </ulink>
              </para>
            </listitem>
            <listitem>
              <para>
          A /24 network with the gateway being at xxx.xxx.xxx.1, no DHCP should be on this network and 
          none of the computers running CloudStack will have a dynamic address. Again this is done for 
          the sake of simplicity. 
              </para>
            </listitem>
          </orderedlist>
        </para>
      </section>

</chapter>