Hopefully this provides an easy entry into running Openstack Nova in a vm.
I've divided it into two sections, a beginner and advanced.
It's going to have everything setup in a downloadable virtual box image, that anyone can use to just play with the Nova api. NOTE: This is based on stable releases, the current one being Cactus.
This is more for developers and those looking to understand what's happening under the hood. It has some detailed steps on what needs to be done to run a development version of nova. The latest trunk code will be used for this and it's should be understood that things can be broken.