FWIW: Current OpenStack status

Ian McLeod imcleod at redhat.com
Thu Apr 26 13:27:21 UTC 2012


> >Going forward we are working to make the image management bits conductor
> >pluggable so we can swap things in and out. AFAIK it looks like
> >boxgrinder supports building images for openstack so we should be able
> >to use that for that scenario until imagefactory supports openstack (at
> >which point we can just enable the flag to swap that back in)
> >
> >  -Mo
> 
> This point I have to disagree with.  While we _are_ in the process of
> making our factory interaction into a rails engine, that does not
> imply any plans to switch _away_ from factory, even temporarily.  In
> factory v2, it will actually also serve some of the functionality that iwhd
> currently provides us, so swapping it out entirely would be
> detrimental to the whole stack.  In fact, factory _mostly_ has
> openstack support already, from what I understand.  Iirc, there has
> been a working rackspace impl for quite some time, even though we have
> not consumed it from conductor.  

We do indeed have some rarely-used and sparsely tested support for
snapshot style RackSpace builds.

However, what I gather will be more interesting to people is the ability
to upload scratch-built images via Glance.  I'm working on support for
that now and it should be completed in our current sprint, which ends in
2.5 weeks.  (It may be available in git much sooner than that.)

A larger question is what specific OpenStack configurations we wish to
support.  It appears that OpenStack can use just about every commonly
deployed hypervisor:

http://docs.openstack.org/cactus/openstack-compute/admin/content/selecting-a-hypervisor.html

I'm pretty sure we won't be able to produce a single binary image that
can run on all of those.  For example, we know that a RHEL5 image must
be configured to boot a different kernel in the Xen environment.  It's
also unclear to what extent OpenStack is able to munge the image format
in a multiple hypervisor configuration.  Can it, for example, take a
qcow2 image and transform it to VMDK in order to launch an ESX VM? 

> CC'ing Ian and Steve so they can
> clarify where that stands, and if they have any time/plans to look at
> it, or need some help from the community if that is a desired feature.
>  From what I recall there were an unknown number of 'tweaks' needed to
> deal with generic openstack vs rackspace specifically (perhaps unknown
> only to me).
> 
> -j

-- 
Ian McLeod - Red Hat
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