Open Stack

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 09:56:57PM +0000, Heck, Joseph wrote:
> Hey Jay! (yeah, I’m here and lurking in the corners, albeit with a
> different email at the moment)
> 
> Yep - RackHD was created by a company that was acquired by EMC to attack
> the lowest-level of hardware automation. EMC was interesting in pushing
> that into Open Source, and surprisingly I was completely game for that
> project :-) There’s all sorts of PR around that project that I won’t
> bother replaying here, but if anyone’s interested, I’d be happy to share
> more details.
> 
> There was immediately interest in how this could work with OpenStack, and
> as a plugin/driver to Ironic was the obvious play. We took a couple
> different options of possible attacks, and decided to leverage something
> that would both show off the underlying hardware introspection which
> wasn’t obviously visible (or arguably perhaps relevant) from the Ironic
> style APIs (the horizon plugin) as well as be leverage by Ironic to do
> hardware provisioning using those APIs.
> 
> Andre (who was key in doing this effort inside EMC) was interested in
> helping manage it and is bringing it here to introduce folks to the fact
> that we’ve done this work, and that it will be submitted it into
> incubation with OpenStack. So yep - we totally want to contribute it to
> the Ironic efforts. Andre and Jim are coordinating on that effort (hi
> jroll, nice to meet you) and it was Jim that suggested that Andre let the
> community know here that we’ve started this effort.

Hi. :)

So, to be clear, I haven't been working with Andre on this, except to
help him figure out how to create an OpenStack project, and to suggest
he email this list.

>From what I know, the things RackHD/shovel offer that Ironic (Inspector)
doesn't have is additional SEL monitoring, as well as the capability to
register a second ironic node as a failover for another node (I haven't
investigated how this actually works).

I do share Jay's concern - why are these separate projects, rather than
contributing to ironic (inspector) itself? Why would a user want to use
both ironic *and* RackHD?

>From the RackHD docs:
"RackHD is focused on being the lowest level of automation that
interrogates agnostic hardware and provisions machines with operating
systems."

And the Ironic mission statement:
"To produce an OpenStack service and associated libraries capable of
managing and provisioning physical machines, and to do this in a
security-aware and fault-tolerant manner."

So, I'm not sure I see much difference in the goals, which makes me
wonder if ironic and RackHD are truly complementary (as shovel implies)
or if they are actually aiming to do the same thing.

I'd love to see RackHD folks contributing to Ironic. Would it possible
for EMC to work on contributing RackHD features that Ironic lacks into
Ironic, rather than building a bridge between the two?

// jim

> 
> Anyway, I’m lurking here again - but Andre is doing to real lifting :-)
> 
> -joe
> 
> On 1/13/16, 1:22 PM, "Mooney, Sean K" <sean.k.mooney at intel.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Jay Pipes [mailto:jaypipes at gmail.com]
> >> Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2016 8:53 PM
> >> To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> >> Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] Shovel (RackHD/OpenStack)
> >> 
> >> On 01/13/2016 03:28 PM, Keedy, Andre wrote:
> >> > Hi All, I'm pleased to announce a new application called 'Shovel 'that
> >> > is now available in a public repository on GitHub
> >> > (https://github.com/keedya/Shovel).  Shovel is a server with a set of
> >> > APIs that wraps around RackHD/Ironic's existing APIs allowing users to
> >> > find Baremetal Compute nodes that are dynamically discovered by RackHD
> >> > and register them with Ironic. Shovel also uses the SEL pollers
> >> > service in RackHD to monitor compute nodes and logs errors from SEL
> >> > into the Ironic Database.  Shovel includes a graphical interface using
> >> Swagger UI.
> >> >
> >> > Also provided is a Shovel Horizon plugin to interface with the Shovel
> >> > service that is available in a public repository on GitHub
> >> > (https://github.com/keedya/shovel-horizon-plugin). The Plugin adds a
> >> > new Panel to the admin Dashboard called rackhd that displays a table
> >> > of all the Baremetal systems discovered by RackHD. It also allows the
> >> > user to see the node catalog in a nice table view, register/unregister
> >> > node in Ironic, display node SEL and enable/register a failover node.
> >> >
> >> > I invite you to take a look at Shovel and Shovel horizon plugin that
> >> > is available to the public on GitHub.
> >> 
> >> Would EMC be interested in contributing to the OpenStack Ironic project
> >> around hardware discovery and automated registration of hardware? It
> >> would be nice to have a single community pulling in the same direction.
> >> It looks to me that RackHD is only a few months old. Was there a
> >> particular reason that EMC decided to start a new open source project
> >> for doing hardware management instead of contributing to the OpenStack
> >> Ironic project?
> >> 
> >> It was a bit surprising to me actually, to see Joe Heck, who used to be
> >> a very active contributor in OpenStack, started the RackHD project.
> >> 
> >> Also, just FYI, "Shovel" is a RabbitMQ thing:
> >> 
> >> https://www.rabbitmq.com/shovel.html
> >> 
> >> Might be worth looking into a rename of your project to avoid confusion,
> >> but that's just a suggestion.
> >Its also a python library for converting function into tasks invokable
> >From the commandline however it has not had a release in the past year so
> >Development may not be ongoing.
> >
> >https://github.com/seomoz/shovel
> >https://pypi.python.org/pypi/shovel
> >
> >> 
> >> Best,
> >> -jay
> >> 
> >> 
> >> ________________________________________________________________________
> >> __
> >> OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
> >> Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-
> >> request at lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
> >> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> >
> >__________________________________________________________________________
> >OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
> >Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
> >http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> 
> __________________________________________________________________________
> OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)
> Unsubscribe: OpenStack-dev-request at lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe
> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev