Hi All
As announced by Lucian last November (see [0]) Cloudbase Solutions are no longer in a position to maintain support for running OpenStack on Windows and have also ceased operation of their 3rd party CI for the windows support across a number of OpenStack projects.
This situation has resulted in the Winstackers project becoming PTL-less for the 2023.2 cycle with no volunteers responding to the TC's call to fill this role and take this feature in OpenStack forward (see [1]).
This is the final call for any maintainers to step forward if this feature is important to them in OpenStack.
The last user survey in 2022 indicated that 2% of respondents were running on Hyper-V so this might be important enough to warrant a commitment from someone operating OpenStack on Windows to maintain these features going forward.
Here is a reminder from Lucian's original email on the full list of projects which are impacted in some way:
* nova hyper-v driver - in-tree plus out-of-tree compute-hyperv driver * os-win - common Windows library for Openstack * neutron hyperv ml2 plugin and agent * ovs on Windows and neutron ovs agent support * cinder drivers - SMB and Windows iSCSI * os-brick Windows connectors - iSCSI, FC, SMB, RBD * ceilometer Windows poller * manila Windows driver * glance Windows support * freerdp gateway
The lack of 3rd party CI for testing all of this really needs to be addressed as well.
If no maintainers are forthcoming between now and the next PTG in June the TC will need to officially retire the project and start the process of removing support for Windows across the various projects that support this operating system in some way - either directly or through the use of os-win.
For clarity this call refers to the use of the Hyper-V virtualisation driver and associated Windows server components to provide WIndows based OpenStack Hypervisors and does not relate to the ability to run Windows images as guests on OpenStack.
Regards
James
[0] https://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2022-November/031044... [1] https://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2023-March/032888.ht...