%BOOK_ENTITIES; ]> 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.

This runbook will focus on building a CloudStack cloud using KVM with CentOS 6.2 with NFS storage on a flat layer-2 network utilizing layer-3 network isolation (aka Security Groups). KVM, or Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a virtualization technology for the Linux kernel. KVM supports native virtualization atop processors with hardware virtualization extensions. Security Groups act as distributed firewalls that control access to a group of virtual machines.

To complete this runbook you'll need the following items: At least one computer which supports hardware virtualization. The CentOS 6.2 x86_64 minimal installation CD available from here: 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 may have a dynamic address. Copy of CloudStack 3.0.2 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS 6.2 available here: