Cloud computing is one of the frontier technologies, which over the last decade has gained a widespread commercial and educational user base. OpenStack is one of the popular open source cloud management platforms for establishing a private or public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) cloud. Although OpenStack started with very few core modules, it now houses nearly 38 modules and is quite complex. Such a complex software bundle is bound to have an impact on the underlying hardware utilization of the host system. The objective is to monitor the usage of system resources by OpenStack on commodity hardware. This paper analyzes the effect of OpenStack on the host machine's hardware. An extensive empirical evaluation has been done on different types of hardware, at different virtualization levels and with different flavours of operating systems comparing the CPU utilization, memory consumption, disk I/O, network, and I/O requests. OpenStack was deployed using Devstack on a single node. The novel aspect of this work is monitoring the resource usage by OpenStack without creating virtual machines on commodity hardware. From the analysis of data, it is observed that standalone machine with Ubuntu server operating system is the least effected by OpenStack and thereby has more available resources for computation of user workloads. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2020-01246 Full Text: PDF