The deployment plan

Every implementation of OpenStack should start with a deployment plan. The design document describes what's being deployed and why, whereas the deployment plan describes how. Like the design document, the content of a deployment plan varies from organization to organization. It should at least include the following things:

• Hardware: This is a list of the compute, storage, and network hardware available for the deployment.
• Network addressing: This is a table of IP and MAC addresses for the network assets in the deployment. For deployments of hundreds of compute nodes, this should probably be limited to a set of VLANs and subnets available for the deployment.
• Deployment-specific configuration: We'll assume that the configuration of the OpenStack deployment is automated. These are any settings that an engineer would need to adjust before launching the automated deployment of the environment.
• Requirements: These are things that need to be in place before the deployment can proceed. Normally, this is hardware configuration, switch configuration, LUN masking, and so on.

A good deployment plan will document everything that an engineering team needs to know to take the design document and instantiate it in the physical world. One thing that we like to leave out of the deployment plan is step-by-step instructions on how to deploy OpenStack. That information typically lives in an Installation Guide, which may be provided by a vendor or written by the operations team.