Open Stack

Brocade no longer supports their cinder Fibre Channel Zone Manager 
driver [0].  It was marked 'unsupported' in Ussuri and deprecated for 
removal during the Victoria development cycle.  (We just discovered this 
week that it is in fact unusable in Ussuri as it does not run in Python 
3.  It does pass all unit tests in Python 3, though.)

Its removal will leave cinder with only one FCZM driver, so there has 
been some interest among Cinder project members in fixing the driver so 
it will at least run in Python 3.6 and 3.8.  However, we don't know at 
the moment how much effort that will take.  Further, without a 
third-party CI continually testing this driver, we cannot guarantee that 
once fixed, it will continue to function correctly.  (No human can 
guarantee that any software of sufficient complexity functions 
correctly, but you know what I mean.)

The point of this email is threefold:

1. If nobody is using the Brocade FCZM driver, then maybe we should just 
go ahead and remove it.  So if you are using it, please let us know.

2. According to [0], for OpenStack users after Train, "Brocade 
encourages customers to perform SAN Zoning operations using other 
available tools or APIs."  So if you are a Brocade user who has 
successfully configured another solution to replace the Brocade FCZM, 
the Cinder team (and the wider OpenStack community) would be interested 
in hearing about it.

3. If you are a consumer of the current cinder Brocade FCZM and are 
interested in its continued existence, the Cinder team would be 
interested in discussing with you how we could set up a third-party CI 
for it.  As I said earlier, without the third-party CI, we really have 
no idea whether this thing works or not.

I've already posted a patch to remove the Brocade FCZM driver [1]. 
(Just so you know we're serious about this.)  At our R-16 mid-cycle 
meeting earlier this week, the Cinder team agreed to make a final 
decision at our next mid-cycle at week R-9.  (Yes, we have two 
mid-cycles and neither is at the middle of the cycle -- we're already 
meeting in virtual space, so we also meet in virtual time.)  So please 
communicate your thoughts to us before week R-9 by replying to this 
email on the mailing list.


cheers,
brian

[0] https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12397527
[1] https://review.opendev.org/#/c/738148/