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.
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.
Hi,
Is there any chance to not deprecate vmware support ? We have customers who are using this ...
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
[2]
https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/897017
[3]
https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/glance_store/+/893696
[4]
https://lists.openstack.org/archives/list/openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org/message/PASMLPZC6B6U2EOA3CS76RKIQV7UPBCT/
[5]
https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/ceilometer/+/894540
