Open Stack

Hello,

We are using vGPUs with Nova on OpenStack Xena release and we’ve had a fairly good experience integration
NVIDIA A10 GPUs into our cloud.

As we see it there is some painpoints that just goes with mantaining the GPU feature.

- There is a very tight coupling of the NVIDIA driver in the guest (instance) and on the compute node that needs to
  be managed.

- Doing maintainance need more planning i.e powering off instances, NVIDIA driver on compute node needs to be
  rebuilt on hypervisor if kernel is upgraded unless you’ve implemented DKMS for that.

- Because we’ve different flavor of GPU (we split the A10 cards into different flavors for maximum utilization of
  other compute resources) we added custom traits in the Placement service to handle that, handling that with
  a script since doing anything manually related to GPUs you will get confused quickly. [1]

- Since Nova does not handle recreation of mdevs (or use the new libvirt autostart feature for mdevs) we have
  a systemd unit that executes before the nova-compute service that walks all the libvirt domains and does lookups
  in Placement to recreate the mdevs before nova-compute start. [2] [3] [4]

Best regards
Tobias

DISCLAIMER: Below is provided without any warranty of actually working for you or your setup and does
very specific things that we need and is only provided to give you some insight and help. Use at your own risk.

[1] https://paste.opendev.org/show/b6FdfwDHnyJXR0G3XarE/
[2] https://paste.opendev.org/show/bGtO6aIE519uysvytWv0/
[3] https://paste.opendev.org/show/bftOEIPxlpLptkosxlL6/
[4] https://paste.opendev.org/show/bOYBV6lhRON4ntQKYPkb/
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