Solaris ? I thought it was OES or did it merge with OEL ... :-) now. I am an old Solaris hack as well, containers, zones, LDOMS, hard partitions the whole nine yards. So, yes Unix is the heart of OpenStack, you will be at home. Couple ways to do this, get a 4-8 core server, with 32GB (at least) of RAM, and I would use SSD. You can run Devstack or build you own from the command line off the bare metal. Another option, and hopefully I don't get voted of the island, is to put ESX on the Bare metal and then you can have a farm of Unix nodes to build out a real OpenStack deployment, with services running on controller nodes and VM running on hypervisor nodes. Today I use a Mac with VMWare fusion to do OpenStack and even KVM work. I have a few home servers as well that I am looking at upgrading myself.