Open Stack

On 2015-01-16, Dave Walker <email at daviey.com> wrote:
> On 13 January 2015 at 18:28, Csaba Henk <csaba at redhat.com> wrote:
><SNIP>
>> We (Manila developers) plan to start a new side-project that would
>> be hosted on Stackforge. It's tentatively named "Manila Image Project",
>> although it would not necessarily be Manila specific.
>>
>> It's aim is to provide infrastructure for building custom VM images.
><SNIP>
>
> At risk of going off topic, I am curious how this fits under the
> Manila project scope.  My understanding of Manila is that it is a File
> Shares service.  This seems to have an odd overlap with creating VM
> images.
>
> Can you point me to the design or blueprint for this need, so I can
> better understand?

Certain drivers of Manila use VMs as tools, as part of the network
infrastructure.

This appeared in the generic driver, which is the basic open-source
driver of the project; there these are called "service VM"-s.

So the service VM is the entity that
- has a connection to the storage backend
- has a connection to the tenant VMs
  and provides to them the  exporting services
  (NFS, CIFS)
   
 -- while the tenant VMs and the storage backend are network
separated. Here is a sketch for this layout:

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1fVdhJjn04sPoitR9cOXcdw3AUX23NGM1fuzZfZRNWnI/edit

Now the current effort is to generalize this concept so that other
drivers can use such a layout with in their custom way. In that context,
for that generalized role the term "share server" will be used (it's not
necessarily a standalone VM like in the original scheme, but might be like
that).

For the generic driver we've used so far a standard Ubuntu cloud image.

Problems:
- the Ubuntu image is not ideal, mainly because it's an order of magnitude
  bigger than our idea of an service VM (which should be similar to an
  embedded image)
- with making the generic driver's infrastructure a reusable component,
  further drivers need images for share server role so we need to be
  able to customize the VM

So the image project would allow us to create service VM / share server
images the way we like it!

HTH
Csaba