[openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

Kyle Mestery (kmestery) kmestery at cisco.com
Mon Dec 2 02:52:28 UTC 2013


On Dec 1, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Alessandro Pilotti <apilotti at cloudbasesolutions.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> 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? :-)
> 
> Here’s the repo for this Nova driver project: https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/
> 
> 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.
> 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. 
> 
> 
> The main idea was to create something to be used in place of solutions like Vagrant, with a few specific requirements:
> 
> 1) Full support for nested virtualization (VMX and EPT).
> 
> 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.
> This rules out Vagrant as an option. Their VMware support is not free and beside that they don’t support nested virtualization (yet, AFAIK). 
> 
> Other workstation virtualization options, including VirtualBox and Hyper-V are currently ruled out due to the lack of support for this feature as well.
> 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.
> 
> 2) Work on Windows, Linux and OS X workstations
> 
> Here’s a snapshot of Nova compute  running on OS X and showing Novnc connected to a Fusion VM console:
> 
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png
> 
> 3) Use OpenStack APIs
> 
> We wanted to have a single common framework for automation and bring OpenStack on the workstations. 
> Beside that, dogfooding is a good thing. :-) 
> 
> 4) Offer a free alternative for community contributions
>   
> VMware Player is fair enough, even with the “non commercial use” limits, etc.
> 
> 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.:
> 
> from vix import vixutils
> with vixutils.VixConnection() as conn:
>     with conn.open_vm(vmx_path) as vm:
>         vm.power_on()
> 
> 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.
> 
> TODOs:
> 
> 1) A minimal Neutron agent for attaching networks (now all networks are attached to the NAT interface).
> 2) Resize disks on boot based on the flavor size
> 3) Volume attach / detach (we can just reuse the Hyper-V code for the Windows case)
> 4) Same host resize
> 
> Live migration is not making particularly sense in this context, so the implementation is not planned. 
> 
> Note: we still have to commit the unit tests. We’ll clean them during next week and push them.
> 
> 
> As usual, any idea, suggestions and especially contributions are highly welcome!
> 
> We’ll follow up with a blog post with some additional news related to this project quite soon. 
> 
> 
This is very cool Alessandro, thanks for sharing! Any plans to try and get this
nova driver upstreamed?

Thanks,
Kyle

> Thanks,
> 
> Alessandro
> 
> 
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