Hardware and performance

Quickstart Guide from the OpenLdap site
http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin23/quickstart.html

Another tutorial
http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialLDAP-SLAPD-LDIF-V2-config.html

And I second Inari phpldapadmin is a useful tool once you get the initial slapd.conf setup. It makes it easier to add user, etc.