Open Stack

Hey Jay!

I was looking at implementing a few scheduling algorithms of my own
natively into OpenStack, and for that I went through the nova-scheduler.
After going through the scheduler, I felt that it was not very easy to
implement or extend and add new scheduling algorithms to the scheduler. The
only things that I felt that I could change or maybe was provisioned for
adding or extending were the filters and weighers and implementing new
scheduling algorithms with just these 2 knobs was a little hard. I did
change the code in the filter_scheduler to get some basic algorithms
running like the first and next fit apart from the spreading and stacking
which was already present. But to go beyond and to implement more complex
algorithms was much harder and I would have to change a lot of code in
different places that could as a side effect also break things and didn't
seem clean. I might be wrong and might have not understood things right,
please correct me if so.

To give an example of what I mean by a little complex scheduling
algorithms: a subset matching algorithm - that schedules multiple
heterogeneous requests by picking out a subset from the requests that best
fit a host/s, so this would improve the utilization. The prerequisite for
this is that I have multiple heterogeneous requests lined up to be
scheduled. So for this kind of an algorithm it isnt easy to implement into
OpenStack.

So a workaround that I'm working on for implementing different scheduling
algorithms is by building a scheduling wrapper outside of the OpenStack
architecture, where the user interacts with this wrapper and in the wrapper
I get the host details from the database and based on the algorithm I want,
the scheduler chooses the host for the request and gives out a VM : Host
mapping (The wrapper does the sanity checks that the filters do to check if
the host can accommodate or handle the request). Along with the request, I
also want to pass this mapping that the scheduler can use to assign the
request to the host passed in the mapping. I've written a filter that
filters all the hosts apart from the host that I sent and this is how I
make sure that the request gets placed on the host that I had passed. I
have come up with a hack to pass the host to the scheduler, but it is not
quite elegant.

Would be great to have your input on the same!

On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 12:51 AM, Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:

> Apologies for the delayed responses. Comments inline.
>
> On 01/27/2016 02:29 AM, Dhvanan Shah wrote:
>
>> Hey Jay!
>>
>> Thanks for the clarification. There was another thing that I wanted to
>> know, is there any provision to pass extra arguments or some extra
>> specifications along with the VM request to nova. To give you some
>> context, I wanted to pass a host:vm mapping to the nova scheduler for
>> its host selection process, and I'm providing this mapping from outside
>> of the openstack architecture.
>>
>
> Why do you want to do this? The scheduler is the thing that sets the host
> -> vm mapping -- that's what the process of scheduling does.
>
> > So I need to send this information along
>
>> with the request to the scheduler. One way of doing this was creating
>> new flavors with their extra specification as different hosts, but that
>> would lead to as you pointed out earlier a "flavor explosion" problem.
>>
>> So is there a way to pass some extra arguments or some additional
>> information to nova.
>>
>
> Depends what exactly you are trying to pass to Nova. Could you give some
> more information about your use case?
>
> Thanks!
> -jay
>



-- 
Dhvanan Shah
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