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This is a guest post from Devdatta Kulkarni. Thanks Dev for sharing!

The Computer Society of India (CSI) Pune chapter organized an OpenStack talk with me, Racker Devdatta Kulkarni, on Saturday January 21, 2012 from 5.00 pm – 6.30 pm.

Approximately 35 people attended. The audience primarily consisted of people with a technical background. Technology professionals were the most represented category followed by college students, followed by researchers.

I divided my talk into two parts. In the first part, I touched upon the need for OpenStack, the project’s history and mission, and the current projects. In the second part I delved deeper into design and architectures of Nova, Swift, Glance, and Keystone, and concluded with information about how to participate in the community.

At the end of the talk I did a quick show of hands to find out how many attendees knew about OpenStack prior to the talk. Given that I saw only three hands in response, I think the talk certainly helped in raising the awareness of OpenStack within the technical community in Pune.

Here are some of the questions that came up at the talk. Anne Gentle wrote the answers for the questions and I want to share with the attendees as well as OpenStack blog readers.
Question 1) Performance benchmarks of OpenStack deployments. They have experimented with deployment of about 200 VMs and were seeing average VM creation time of about 20 minutes. They wanted to know if this was something expected. Also, they were wondering if there are any OpenStack performance benchmark results that can be shared with the community.
Anne: A 20 minute wait sounds like a long time to me for a single VM but a short time for 200 Vms. We haven’t found a good way to share performance benchmarks yet but a post to the mailing list would probably elicit responses. I’ve also seen John Dickinson talk to folks on IRC about their Object Storage benchmarks.

Question 2) Guidelines on topology. They wanted to know if there are any published guidelines regarding the optimal topology, such as number of glance servers, number of compute, volume, and network nodes in Nova deployments?
Anne: I’d recommend they take a look at http://referencearchitecture.org for both physical and logical architecture diagrams that show the number of servers and how to scale out a deployment.

Question 3) Active Directory support in Keystone. Is this being discussed within the Keystone working group?
Anne: It’s often discussed but no one has stepped up to write an AD plugin for Keystone yet that I know of.

Question 4) Is there a QEMU-based development environment for OpenStack?
Anne: Try out http://devstack.org and if you run it in a VM, it’ll use QEMU.

Question 5) Can you give pointers to learning material?
Anne: Each of the projects has a development docs site (nova.openstack.org, glance.openstack.org, swift.openstack.org, and so on). You’ll find API and admin docs at docs.openstack.org.