Open Stack

Hi all,

I'm not subscribed to this list, usually I'm just a (new) Openstack  
user, but I have a question regarding the Horizon dashboard  
respectively launching instances via dashboard.

I have a Liberty deployment running on 1 controller and 2 compute nodes.
I also deployed an external cinder-volume as a storage backend for my  
instances. It works fine if you use the nova boot command (nova boot  
--block-device[...]) to launch instances or if you use kvm as  
hypervisor. But if you use xen (as I do) and you want to launch the  
instance via Horizon dashboard, you get an invalid block device  
mapping, because nova tries to attach /dev/vda as root device instead  
of /dev/xvda:

nova-compute.log:

[instance: 09f96335-4f3b-4b3e-a7b3-ef384144b00b] Booting with blank  
volume at /dev/vda

libxl-driver.log:

2016-03-21 14:01:07 CET libxl: error: libxl.c:2733:device_disk_add:  
Invalid or unsupported virtual disk identifier vda
2016-03-21 14:01:07 CET libxl: error:  
libxl_create.c:1167:domcreate_launch_dm: unable to add disk devices

As I already said, this error doesn't occur if you use CLI.
So I tried to figure out, what the difference between nova boot and  
Horizon is.
On controller node is the file  
/srv/www/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/dashboards/project/instances/workflows/create_instance.py which contains an assignment for the (by default) invisible field "can_set_mount_point" to the variable "device_name", here is a snippet from the class  
SetInstanceDetailsAction():

---cut here---
    device_name = forms.CharField(label=_("Device Name"),
                                  required=False,
                                  INITIAL="VDA",
                                  help_text=_("Volume mount point  
(e.g. 'vda' "
                                              "mounts at '/dev/vda'). Leave "
                                              "this field blank to let the "
                                              "system choose a device name "
                                              "for you."))
---cut here---

Now if I make that field visible and change its value to XVDA,  
everything works fine and the VM is created successfully. So I made a  
minor change to see if it's more suitable for my environment, I  
changed the initial value of "device_name":

---cut here---
    device_name = forms.CharField(label=_("Device Name"),
                                  required=False,
                                  INITIAL="",
---cut here---

and removed the assignment "{'device_name': device_name}" from the  
array "dev_mapping_2". Instead, I appended an if-statement to add the  
device_name only if it's not empty:

---cut here---
        elif source_type == 'volume_image_id':
            device_name = context.get('device_name', '').strip() or None
            dev_mapping_2 = [
                {'source_type': 'image',
                 'destination_type': 'volume',
                 'delete_on_termination':
                     bool(context['delete_on_terminate']),
                 'uuid': context['source_id'],
                 'boot_index': '0',
                 'volume_size': context['volume_size']
                 }
            ]
            IF DEVICE_NAME:
                DEV_MAPPING_2.APPEND({"DEVICE_NAME": DEVICE_NAME})
---cut here---

This seems to work (for me), but I'm quite new to Openstack, so what  
would your professional opinion be on this subject?
Of course, that if-statement would be also necessary if the  
"source_type" is "volume_snapshot_id", at least if this would be the  
way to go.

I'm looking forward to your answer!

Regards,
Eugen
  Eugen Block                             voice   :
+49-40-559 51 75
NDE Netzdesign und -entwicklung AG      fax     : +49-40-559 51 77
Postfach 61 03 15                       
D-22423 Hamburg                         e-mail  :
eblock at nde.ag

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