OpenStack Documentation & Learning Hub
Welcome to the VM2Cloud OpenStack learning hub—a curated collection of resources, guides, best practices, and architecture blueprints for developers, architects, and enterprise teams.
Beginner Guides
Start with the fundamentals of Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Glance, Keystone, Horizon, and how OpenStack components interact to power a private cloud.
Migration Case Study
Learn how a multinational enterprise migrated from VMware to OpenStack using VM2Cloud, achieving 40% TCO reduction and full sovereignty.
API Integration Guide
Explore how to authenticate with Keystone, create instances, manage volumes, configure networking, and automate workflows using Terraform or Ansible.
Operations & Deployment References
Reference architectures for HA controllers, Ceph clusters, SDN topologies, monitoring stacks, and upgrade workflows used in production environments.
A Map of the OpenStack Services
These are the services a new team usually meets first:
- Nova: compute. Creates and manages virtual machine instances.
- Neutron: networking. Tenant networks, routers, security groups and floating IPs.
- Cinder: block storage. Persistent volumes, snapshots and volume types.
- Glance: images. The templates instances are booted from.
- Keystone: identity. Projects, users, roles, tokens and application credentials.
- Heat: orchestration. Describes a set of resources in a template and creates them together.
First Steps With a Tenancy
Getting started with a managed OpenStack tenancy follows the usual OpenStack pattern: load your project credentials into the openstack command-line client, confirm that you can authenticate, check which services your region offers, then choose an image and a flavor and create an instance on your project network.
The Managed OpenStack quickstart on docs.vm2cloud.com walks through these steps with example commands.
Automating Instead of Clicking
Every action available in the dashboard is also available through the API, which is what makes OpenStack suitable for infrastructure as code. Typical routes are the openstack command line, the SDKs, Terraform and Ansible. A common progression is to start with the command line to learn the objects, then capture repeatable builds in Terraform configurations or Ansible playbooks kept in version control.
Topics Worth Reading Next
- Ceph Storage: how volumes, snapshots and S3-compatible object storage work on a Ceph backend.
- Kubernetes on OpenStack: how Kubernetes clusters run on OpenStack compute, networking and storage.
- VMware Migration: how VMware concepts map to OpenStack and how workloads move.
- OpenStack Pricing: what drives the total cost of an OpenStack cloud.
- Private Cloud: what the cloud operator runs and what you run.
Request Access to Full Documentation Portal
Get role-based access to advanced documentation, IaC modules, and implementation playbooks.