Open Stack

On 02 Dec 2013, at 04:52 , Kyle Mestery (kmestery) <kmestery at cisco.com> wrote:

> 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!

My personal opinion is that drivers should stay outside of Nova in a separate project. Said that, this driver is way easier to mantain than the Hyper-V one for example, so I wouldn’t have objections if this is what the community prefers.
On the other side, this driver will hardly have a CI as it’s not a requirement for the expected usage and this wouldn’t fit with the current (correct IMO) decision that only drivers with a CI gate will stay in Nova starting with Icehouse.
Said that, I would’t have of course anything against somebody (VMware?) volunteering for the CI. ;-)

IMO, as also Chmouel suggested in this thread, a Stackforge project could be a good start. This should make it easier for people to contribute and we’ll have a couple of release cycles to decide what to do with it.

Alessandro


> Thanks,
> Kyle
> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Alessandro
>> 
>> 
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