Open Stack

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 12:54:50PM -0500, Mathieu Gagné wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 12:21 PM Paul Belanger <pabelanger at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Greetings,
> >
> > I wanted to ask if anybody in the community is running VMware a top of
> > OpenStack in any capacity?  In Ansible we are doing a POC as part of our
> > testing platform and running into some common ops issue. For example,
> > what do people usually do for things like using config-drive? Is there
> > any specific tooling you us to customize esxi images to run atop
> > OpenStack.
> >
> > Bascially, looking for humans to bounce questions off and see who else
> > is doing it.
> >
> 
> We don't plan on running ESXi on top of KVM but alongside KVM on a
> baremetal. So I won't be able to address that specific use case.
> 
> However I can share with you what we are planning to do with
> config-drive support. (we are actively working on it as I'm typing)
> 
> At first, we tried to package Glean for VMware and install that
> package when we built the image. The issue with that is that the
> package isn't signed. This can affect support and prevent the overall
> system from being updated due to the presence of an unsigned package.
> You would need some kind of partnership with VMware to get it signed.
> 
> We therefore switched to a firstboot script which can be configured in
> the kickstart when building the image:
> https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.esxi.upgrade.doc/GUID-61A14EBB-5CF3-43EE-87EF-DB8EC6D83698.html
> (see %firstboot section)
> 
> You can have multiple %firstboot section both using busybox or python
> as an interpreter.
> 
> We have multiple sections performing various steps:
> 1) Find the config-drive partition. Since it's baremetal, config-drive
> is a primary partition at the end of the disk.
> 2) Load the iso9660 module
> 3) Mount the config-drive
> 4) A whole Python section which parses config-drive and perform
> hostname/network/password/publickeys configuration.
> 5) General cleanup: unmount config-drive, unload iso9660 module
> 
> Now since it's a firstboot script, VMware no longer complains about
> unsigned packages.
> 
> I hope this help.
> 
Nice, this is exactly the type of thing I was hoping for! Awesome!  In
fact, my initial though too was also update glean adding vmware support,
good to know somebody else tried this first.

As for first boot, this too in the approach we are taking. A teammate
has created a python script to do the same. My first question was, why
couldn't that script be glean? That is the part I am a little confused
about.

Also, are you interested in working on this 'python' script together
upstream? I suspect we might be working to solve the same issue related
to hostname, network, SSH.

Paul

> --
> Mathieu
>