[openstack-dev] [tc][nova][ironic][mogan] Evaluate Mogan project

Dmitry Tantsur dtantsur at redhat.com
Mon Sep 25 12:35:25 UTC 2017


Hi!

Thanks for raising this. I was interested in the project for some time, but I 
never got a chance to wrap my head around. I also have a few concerns - please 
see inline.

On 09/25/2017 01:27 PM, Zhenguo Niu wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> First of all, thanks for the audiences for Mogan project update in the TC room 
> during Denver PTG. Here we would like to get more suggestions before we apply 
> for inclusion.
> 
> Speaking only for myself, I find the current direction of one API+scheduler for 
> vm/baremetal/container unfortunate. After containers management moved out to be 
> a separated project Zun, baremetal with Nova and Ironic continues to be a pain 
> point.
> 
> #. API
> Only part of the Nova APIs and parameters can apply to baremetal instances, 
> meanwhile for interoperable with other virtual drivers, bare metal specific APIs 
> such as deploy time RAID, advanced partitions can not  be included. It's true 
> that we can support various compute drivers, but the reality is that the support 
> of each of hypervisor is not equal, especially for bare metals in a 
> virtualization world. But I understand the problems with that as Nova was 
> designed to provide compute resources(virtual machines) instead of bare metals.

A correction: any compute resources.

Nova works okay with bare metals. It's never going to work perfectly though, 
because we always have to find a common subset of features between VM and BM. 
RAID is a good example indeed. We have a solution for the future, but it's not 
going to satisfy everyone.

Now I have a question: to which extend do you plan to maintain the "cloud" 
nature of the API? Let's take RAID as an example. Ironic can apply a very 
generic or a very specific configuration. You can request "just RAID-5" or you 
can ask for specific disks to be combined in a specific combination. I believe 
the latter is not something we want to expose to cloud users, as it's not going 
to be a cloud any more.

> 
> #. Scheduler
> Bare metal doesn't fit in to the model of 1:1 nova-compute to resource, as 
> nova-compute processes can't be run on the inventory nodes themselves. That is 
> to say host aggregates, availability zones and such things based on compute 
> service(host) can't be applied to bare metal resources. And for grouping like 
> anti-affinity, the granularity is also not same with virtual machines, bare 
> metal users may want their HA instances not on the same failure domain instead 
> of the node itself. Short saying, we can only get a rigid resource class only 
> scheduling for bare metals.

It's not rigid. Okay, it's rigid, but it's not as rigid as what we used to have.

If you're going back to VCPUs-memory-disk triad, you're making it more rigid. Of 
these three, only memory has ever made practical sense for deployers. VCPUs is a 
bit subtle, as it depends on hyper-threading enabled/disabled, and I've never 
seen people using it too often.

But our local_gb thing is an outright lie. Of 20 disks a machine can easily 
have, which one do you report for local_gb? Well, in the best case people used 
ironic root device hints with ironic-inspector to figure out. Which is great, 
but requires ironic-inspector. In the worst case people just put random number 
there to make scheduling work. This is horrible, please make sure to not get 
back to it.

What I would love to see of a bare metal scheduling project is a scheduling 
based on inventory. I was thinking of being able to express things like "give me 
a node with 2 GPU of at least 256 CUDA cores each". Do you plan on this kind of 
things? This would truly mean flexible scheduling.

Which brings me to one of my biggest reservations about Mogan: I don't think 
copying Nova's architecture is a good idea overall. Particularly, I think you 
have flavors, which do not map at all into bare metal world IMO.

> 
> 
> And most of the cloud providers in the market offering virtual machines and bare 
> metals as separated resources, but unfortunately, it's hard to achieve this with 
> one compute service.

Do you have proofs for the first statement? And do you imply public clouds? Our 
customers deploy hybrid environments, to my best knowledge. Nobody I know uses 
one compute service in the whole cloud anyway.

> I heard people are deploying seperated Nova for virtual 
> machines and bare metals with many downstream hacks to the bare metal 
> single-driver Nova but as the changes to Nova would be massive and may invasive 
> to virtual machines, it seems not practical to be upstream.

I think you're overestimated the problem. In TripleO we deploy separate virtual 
nova compute nodes. If ironic is enabled, its nova computes go to controllers. 
Then you can use host aggregates to split flavors between VM and BM. With 
resources classes it's even more trivial: you get this split naturally.

> 
> So we created Mogan [1] about one year ago, which aims to offer bare metals as 
> first class resources to users with a set of bare metal specific API and a 
> baremetal-centric scheduler(with Placement service). It was like an experimental 
> project at the beginning, but the outcome makes us believe it's the right way. 
> Mogan will fully embrace Ironic for bare metal provisioning and with RSD server 
> [2] introduced to OpenStack, it will be a new world for bare metals, as with 
> that we can compose hardware resources on the fly.

Good that you touched this topic, because I have a question here :)

With ironic you *request* a node. With RSD and similar you *create* a node, 
which is closer to VMs than to traditional BMs. This gives a similar problem to 
what we have with nova now. Namely, exact vs non-exact filters. How do you solve 
it? Assuming you plan on using flavors on (which I think is a bad idea), do you 
use exact or non-exact filters? How do you handle the difference between approaches?

> 
> Also, I would like to clarify the overlaps between Mogan and Nova, I bet there 
> must be some users who wants to use one API for the compute resources management 
> as they don't care about whether it's a virtual machine or a bare metal server. 
> Baremetal driver with Nova is still the right choice for such users to get raw 
> performance compute resources. On the contrary, Mogan is for real bare metal 
> users and cloud providers who wants to offer bare metals as a separated resources.
> 
> Thank you for your time!
> 
> 
> [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Mogan
> [2] 
> https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/rack-scale-design-overview.html
> 
> -- 
> Best Regards,
> Zhenguo Niu
> 
> 
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