The blog explains the process of creating a basic Windows stack in Openstack using Heat Orchestration Template. The hypervisor being used is VMware ESXi5.5. Image preparation to upload in glance Lets start with creating a Windows 2012 R2 VM in ESXi. In this server, download and install the cloudbase-init package for windows .The beta version is available at this link: https://www.cloudbase.it/downloads/CloudbaseInitSetup_Beta.msi Follow the steps in this link for installation : http://www.cloudbase.it/cloud-init-for-windows-instances/ Once installation is completed, edit the 'setup.exe" registry key at HKLocal machine/SYSTEM/SETUP/STATUS/ChildCompletion and change the value from 1 to 3. This is to avoid a system restart exception when the image boots up for the first time in openstack If you want to do any custom configurations in the windows machine, like open a specific firewall port, enable ping ,rdp etc..you can do it at this point Run Syprep and shu