I have been kicking the tires on OpenStack again. While the DevStack setup is probably most helpful for unit testing, I find it limiting when it comes to playing with OpenStack.
So, I worked through setting-up on a VirtualBox host a classic three-node architecture (control, network, and compute nodes) using Ubuntu 12.04 as my OpenStack host OS with VirtualBox running on Windows. Additionally, I fully scripted the configuration and installation of the OpenStack components on each node so that once you have the base Ubuntu 12.04 server installed on your VMs, you can be up and running on OpenStack in minutes.
If you would like to see more, checkout https://github.com/BrianBrophy/OpenStack-Installation.