In OpenStack jargon, an Instance is a Virtual Machine, the guest workload. It boots from an operating system image, and it is configured with a certain amount of CPU, RAM and disk space, amongst other parameters such as networking or security settings.

In this blog post kindly contributed by Marko Myllynen we’ll explore nine configuration and optimization options that will help you achieve the required performance, reliability and security that you need for your workloads.

Some of the optimizations can be done inside a guest regardless of what has the OpenStack Cloud Administrator enabled in your cloud. However, more advanced options require prior enablement and, possibly, special host capabilities. This means many of the options described here will depend on how the Administrator configured the cloud, or may not be available for some tenants as they are reserved for certain groups. More information about this subject can be found on the Red Hat Documentation Portal and its comprehensive guide on OpenStack Image Service. Similarly, the upstream OpenStack documentation has some extra guidelines available.

The following configurations should be evaluated for any VM running on any OpenStack environment. These changes have no side-effects and are typically safe to enable even if unused