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Hi all,
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<div>At Cloudbase we are heavily using VMware Workstation and Fusion for development, demos and PoCs, so we thought: why not replacing our automation scripts with a fully functional Nova driver and use OpenStack APIs and Heat for the automation? :-)</div>
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<div>Here’s the repo for this Nova driver project: <a href="https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/">https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/</a></div>
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<div>The driver is already working well and supports all the basic features you’d expect from a Nova driver, including a VNC console accessible via Horizon. Please refer to the project README for additional details.</div>
<div>The usage of CoW images (linked clones) makes deploying images particularly fast, which is a good thing when you develop or run demos. Heat or Puppet, Chef, etc make the whole process particularly sweet of course. </div>
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<div>The main idea was to create something to be used in place of solutions like Vagrant, with a few specific requirements:</div>
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<div>1) Full support for nested virtualization (VMX and EPT).</div>
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<div>For the time being the VMware products are the only ones supporting Hyper-V and KVM as guests, so this became a mandatory path, at least until EPT support will be fully functional in KVM.</div>
<div>This rules out Vagrant as an option. Their VMware support is not free and beside that they don’t support nested virtualization (yet, AFAIK). </div>
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<div>Other workstation virtualization options, including VirtualBox and Hyper-V are currently ruled out due to the lack of support for this feature as well.</div>
<div>Beside that Hyper-V and VMware Workstation VMs can work side by side on Windows 8.1, all you need is to fire up two nova-compute instances.</div>
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<div>2) Work on Windows, Linux and OS X workstations</div>
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<div>Here’s a snapshot of Nova compute running on OS X and showing Novnc connected to a Fusion VM console:</div>
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<div><a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png</a></div>
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<div>3) Use OpenStack APIs</div>
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<div>We wanted to have a single common framework for automation and bring OpenStack on the workstations. </div>
<div>Beside that, dogfooding is a good thing. :-) </div>
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<div>4) Offer a free alternative for community contributions</div>
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<div apple-content-edited="true">VMware Player is fair enough, even with the “non commercial use” limits, etc.
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<div>Communication with VMware components is based on the freely available Vix SDK libs, using ctypes to call the C APIs. The project provides a library to easily interact with the VMs, in case it sould be needed, e.g.:</div>
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<div>from vix import vixutils</div>
<div>with vixutils.VixConnection() as conn:</div>
<div> with conn.open_vm(vmx_path) as vm:</div>
<div> vm.power_on()</div>
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<div>We though about using libvirt, since it has support for those APIs as well, but it was way easier to create a lightweight driver from scratch using the Vix APIs directly.</div>
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<div>TODOs:</div>
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<div>1) A minimal Neutron agent for attaching networks (now all networks are attached to the NAT interface).</div>
<div>2) Resize disks on boot based on the flavor size</div>
<div>3) Volume attach / detach (we can just reuse the Hyper-V code for the Windows case)</div>
<div>4) Same host resize</div>
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<div>Live migration is not making particularly sense in this context, so the implementation is not planned. </div>
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<div>Note: we still have to commit the unit tests. We’ll clean them during next week and push them.</div>
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<div>As usual, any idea, suggestions and especially contributions are highly welcome!</div>
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<div>We’ll follow up with a blog post with some additional news related to this project quite soon. </div>
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<div>Thanks,</div>
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<div>Alessandro</div>
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