Hi Michal, Hi Takashi,

I would be curious what your needs regarding the openstack vmware stack are. In particular,

- Are you using Glance with the  vmware backend driver?
  We are using swift as a backend, so we wouldn't mind it getting dropped.
- What network driver do you use?
  We use our own (https://github.com/sapcc/networking-nsx-t), which only handles security groups and VLAN encapsulation.
- What more esoteric features like Raw Device Mapping?
   We do not use that and have no testing for that in place.

Cheers,
  Fabian


________________________________________
From: Michal Arbet <michal.arbet@ultimum.io>
Sent: 17 January 2024 12:52
To: Wiesel, Fabian
Cc: Takashi Kajinami; openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [cinder][glance][nova][telemetry][monasca][oslo][vmware] Can we deprecate(and remove) VMWare support ?

Hi Fabian,

That's great news ! Thank you for the update.

Feel free to ask me or my colleagues for any help as we are also interested to don't remove VMWare support from the code and we can probably help.

Thanks,
Michal Arbet ( kevko )

Michal Arbet
Openstack Engineer
[https://www.google.com/a/ultimum.io/images/logo.gif]
Ultimum Technologies a.s.
Na Poříčí 1047/26, 11000 Praha 1
Czech Republic

+420 604 228 897
michal.arbet@ultimum.io<mailto:michal.arbet@ultimum.io>
https://ultimum.io/<https://ultimum.io/>

LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/ultimum-technologies> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/ultimumtech> | Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/ultimumtechnologies/timeline>


st 17. 1. 2024 v 12:49 odesílatel Wiesel, Fabian <fabian.wiesel@sap.com<mailto:fabian.wiesel@sap.com>> napsal:
Hi Michal,

From our communications with VMware, it seems they are not likely to step up here.

Regarding the progress with the CI:

I am reporting in weekly Nova team meetings (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/Nova<https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/Nova>)
under the topic vmwareapi 3rd-party CI efforts Highlights.
The removal is pending on delivering a working .

Status of our efforts:

  *
Bot user "vmwareapi CI run by SAP" (sap-openstack-ci), which receives the Gerrit events from review.opendev.org<http://review.opendev.org/>
  *
786GB Host set aside
  *
Six Nested ESXi hosts + VSphere + Ubuntu VM for DevStack running on host
  *
Logs will be made available under http://openstack-ci-logs.global.cloud.sap/<http://openstack-ci-logs.global.cloud.sap/> pending security approval (hopefully this week)
  *
DevStack gets automatically brought up from scratch for each patchSet (That's new from yesterday)

Missing (to my knowledge):

  *   Running the tests
  *   Shipping the logs
  *   Comment/Vote on the PR
  *
Fixes to get it actually working again (because master currently cannot boot with root disk, only with boot-from-volume)

Cheers,
  Fabian

________________________________
From: Michal Arbet <michal.arbet@ultimum.io<mailto:michal.arbet@ultimum.io>>
Sent: 17 January 2024 12:14
To: Takashi Kajinami <kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com<mailto:kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com>>
Cc: openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org> <openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org>>
Subject: Re: [cinder][glance][nova][telemetry][monasca][oslo][vmware] Can we deprecate(and remove) VMWare support ?

You don't often get email from michal.arbet@ultimum.io<mailto:michal.arbet@ultimum.io>. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification>
Hi Takashi, Fabian,

Firstly let me wish you happy new year and only better and better experience with openstack :).

Takashi, does it mean if we provide CI testing for VMware support, you will change your mind and VMware will not be removed from the projects ?

Fabian, have you receive any feedback from VMWare yet ?  You also mentioned that you are setupping nova CI for your needs, do you have some progress ?

Thank you very much

Michal Arbet ( kevko )
Michal Arbet
Openstack Engineer
[https://www.google.com/a/ultimum.io/images/logo.gif]
Ultimum Technologies a.s.
Na Poříčí 1047/26, 11000 Praha 1
Czech Republic

+420 604 228 897
michal.arbet@ultimum.io<mailto:michal.arbet@ultimum.io>
https://ultimum.io/<https://ultimum.io/>

LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/ultimum-technologies> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/ultimumtech> | Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/ultimumtechnologies/timeline>


čt 21. 12. 2023 v 16:41 odesílatel Takashi Kajinami <kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com<mailto:kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com>> napsal:

I brought this topic again to the cinder weekly meeting this week and we agreed to

mark VMWare volume drivers unsupported, following the situation with vmware virt driver.


Please note that, as I mentioned in my previous email, the 3rd parry CI (VMWare NSX CI)
to test these drivers is broken now. So in case the volume drivers are also needed then that CI

should be also restored, to be aligned with the policy[1] in cinder.


[1]

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder/how-to-contribute-a-driver<https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder/how-to-contribute-a-driver>

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder/tested-3rdParty-drivers<https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Cinder/tested-3rdParty-drivers>


On 12/15/23 11:35, Takashi Kajinami wrote:

As the Fabian explained, the core problem here is that we don't have appropriate test coverage

and almost no one maintaining the features don't know whether the feature is still functioning.

This has been a long-existing pain and the situation is becoming much worse recently because

the VMWare 3rd party CI disappeared or are broken.


What we may need to revise the plan would be


1. Understand the actual use cases, the features we need to support these


2. Add appropriate test coverage (by adding 3rd party CI)

 - Nova requires 3rd party CI, which is currently missing

 - Cinder requires 3rd party CI for the vendor volume driver. The CI exists but has been broken.


3. Continue removal for the features no one would maintain


For now I'd suggest we continue deprecation during this cycle, so that we can warn more users

who are using these features but are not aware of this discussion. We can review status of the effort

to maintain these features at some point during next cycle (m-2?) and decide the removal.



On 12/13/23 01:58, Wiesel, Fabian wrote:
Hi Michal,

I am working at SAP, where we also use OpenStack with VMware hypervisor.

the problem is that VMware didn't maintain the third-party CI, so the code is practically untested.

It would be probably good, if your customers would communicate their need to VMware for a working and maintained driver as we did.

We are trying to step up and provide a CI for the nova vmwareapi and the necessary work to keep the driver maintained. Still, the use-case of your customer may not be the same as ours, so vendor support would be still desirable.

We do not use monasca, ceilometer, or the VMware specific backend from glance, so it depends on the community to maintain these (or remove them), unless VMware or someone else steps up.

Cheers,
  Fabian W.





________________________________
From: Michal Arbet <michal.arbet@ultimum.io><mailto:michal.arbet@ultimum.io>
Sent: 11 December 2023 07:48
To: Takashi Kajinami <kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com><mailto:kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com>
Cc: openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org<mailto:openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org> <openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org><mailto:openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: [cinder][glance][nova][telemetry][monasca][oslo][vmware] Can we deprecate(and remove) VMWare support ?


You don't often get email from michal.arbet@ultimum.io<mailto:michal.arbet@ultimum.io>. Learn why this is important<https://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification>

Hi,

Is there any chance to not deprecate vmware support ? We have customers who are using this ...

Thanks
Michal Arbet
Openstack Engineer
[https://www.google.com/a/ultimum.io/images/logo.gif]
Ultimum Technologies a.s.
Na Poříčí 1047/26, 11000 Praha 1
Czech Republic

+420 604 228 897
michal.arbet@ultimum.io<mailto:michal.arbet@ultimum.io>
https://ultimum.io/<https://ultimum.io/>

LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/company/ultimum-technologies> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/ultimumtech> | Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/ultimumtechnologies/timeline>


čt 9. 11. 2023 v 9:29 odesílatel Takashi Kajinami <kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com<mailto:kajinamit@oss.nttdata.com>> napsal:
Hi all,


As you might know, some of the OpenStack projects currently support usage
of VMWare component. However recently the VMware virt driver in nova was
marked experimental in 2023.2 release [1] and it has been discussed that
the driver will be removed in 2023.2 release[2], after deprecation is
backported
to 2023.1.
(Please someone from nova team correct me if I'm wrong)


So my current question is;

Does it make sense to deprecate all of the features to support VMWare
component ?

My understanding is that these features were added to be used along with
VMWare virt driver in nova, but once the virt driver is removed this use
case
is voided.

I'll list up the features within the discussion scope below.

   nova: VMWare virt driver (this is already experimental by [1])

   cinder: VMware Storage Driver (vmdk)

   glance: VMWare Datastore (I proposed deprecating this in [3][4])

   ceilometer: VMWare virt driver (this was deprecated by [5])

   os-brick: VmdkConnector

   monasca-agent: vcenter collector (*1)

   oslo.vmware: the whole project

NOTE:
These features are found based on dependency on oslo.vmware but there
can be a few
not listed here.

Outside of OpenStack's governance, there are two projects dependent on
oslo.vmware,
networking-vsphere and vmware-nsx but both of these look inactive.


Because of SLURP, we have to complete deprecation during in 2024.1
release so that we
can drop the feature right after 2024.1. If we fail then we have to
maintain these features
until 2025.1 (the features already deprecated can be removed earlier,
though).
So I'd like to get feedback and decision before deadline for 2024.1

Thank you,

Takashi


(*1) Monasca is now inactive so I doubt anyone would work on this topic
before it is retired.

[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/863911<https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/863911>
[2] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/897017<https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/897017>
[3] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/glance_store/+/893696<https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/glance_store/+/893696>
[4]
https://lists.openstack.org/archives/list/openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org/message/PASMLPZC6B6U2EOA3CS76RKIQV7UPBCT/<https://lists.openstack.org/archives/list/openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org/message/PASMLPZC6B6U2EOA3CS76RKIQV7UPBCT/>
[5] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/ceilometer/+/894540<https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/ceilometer/+/894540>