Open Stack

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015, at 09:29 AM, Clark Boylan wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2015, at 02:54 PM, Adrian Otto wrote:
> > Infra Team,
> > 
> > OpenStack Magnum seeks to expand the scope of the functional tests we
> > run. Our tests involve the creation of magnum bays, which are composed of
> > nova instances that we create through heat. We will need to create and
> > delete a dozen or so virtual machines (nested within the devstack gate
> > test environment) through the course of the functional tests. We are
> > concerned because creating this many nova instances will take time, and
> > we don’t want to hog the test resources for long periods, and we want our
> > tests to run in a timely fashion.
> > 
> > Rackspace has offered to allocate a pool of several OnMetal servers for
> > use by Magnum, above any beyond the resources that are in the main
> > resource pool. Ideally, Magnum would have the ability to tag our tests in
> > a way so they are run on this resource pool. This would speed up
> > execution by eliminating the nested virtualization needed to create the
> > nova instances that make up the bays. The benefit to other OpenStack
> > projects is that it would free up the resources we are currently
> > consuming, which could reduce contention, and allow other jobs to run
> > sooner.
> > 
> > My questions:
> > 
> > 1) Is this sort of a setup possible and practical?
> My understanding of how OnMetal works is that you talk to Rackspace's
> Nova api and instruct it to boot special flavors using specific images.
> This is mostly how Nodepool works so for the most part it should just
> work.
> 
> The one place I expect trouble is Nodepool expects to build an image
> that it boots either by booting nodes in the cloud and making a snapshot
> or by doing a local DIB build that is uploaded to glance. Does OnMetal
> support performing snapshots? Or will we have to figure out what is
> special in the OnMetal images and ensure that special sauce is baked
> into DIB images for OnMetal?
> > 
> > 2) How long would it (probably) take to get this set up, assuming
> > adequate participation on our side?
> It is really hard to give a number without knowing what the image
> building situation is. If our only choice is DIB images this could be a
> very long time (we have spent roughly the last year trying to get image
> uploads to Rackspace working, we are close to having it work reliably
> now, but it has been a long long road).
>
After a conversation on IRC with JayF and jroll they clarified that
booting from snapshots, direct glance uploads, or volumes is currently
unsupported. We would need to find some alternative, or get one of these
(preferably direct glance uploads) to be supported by OnMetal. Anyways
this probably deserves a bit more brainstorming and discussion, but as I
suspected the images are going to be the difficult thing to work with.

Clark