This document summarizes the VMware compute driver for Openstack. It provides initial support for provisioning virtual machines to ESXi hosts. The driver follows a one compute per host model and supports basic instance lifecycle operations. It also enables linking clones to reduce storage usage. Functionality was tested against an ESXi host and many common operations like provisioning, reboot, and delete were validated. The driver is being enhanced to support vCenter clusters and improve statistics accuracy.

1. VMware compute driver
for
Openstack
Anantha Padmanabhan CB
HP

2. Existing support
• Initial support for VMware was coded by Citrix
• With later versions of openstack, compute driver for the module vmwareapi
was not functional
• VMware has fixed / enhanced the compute driver to support instance
provisioning to a host
• Follows one compute per ESXi host model
• Compute can be local or remote to the scheduler
• Vmware’s blueprint

3. Demo setup Scheduler
Keystone
Cloud
Controller
DB
Compute
rabbitmq-server
Compute Compute
Network Network
KVM VI SDK
ESXi

4. Changes to nova.conf
In addition to the above configuration, place the .wsdl files in the webapps folder of tomcat6 and
restart the tomcat server.

5. Linked clone
Nova configuration flag for VMware Linked Clone support
• --use_linked_clone=[true|false]
• Default value is true
• Creates a folder vmware_base in the datastore and caches the image
• Creates a differential disk under the VM folder in the datastore

6. Functionality tested
Features KVM-Canonical ESXi-Host (5.0)
(Ubuntu 12.04)
VM Provisioning/Lifecycle Create Server(boot ) Create Server(boot )
Reboot Reboot
Delete Server Delete Server
Start/Stop Start/Stop
pause /Unpause pause /Unpause (Not implemented)
Suspend/Resume Suspend/Resume
Rebuild/resize/rename Rebuild/resize/rename
List/show List/show
Glance image-create image-create
Image-delete Image-delete
image-list image-list
Image-show Image-show
Other Operations Live migration Boot from Volume
Snapshot ( backup in grizzly ) Snapshot ( backup in grizzly )
Legend : Green - Validated Blue – Not attempted RED – Not Working

7. Support for vCenter
• VMware is currently working on providing a cluster based support for vCenter
• Configure the cluster name in nova.conf with the attribute
--vmwareapi_cluster_name=<NAME OF CLUSTER IN VCENTER>
• Instances are provisioned in the default resource pool of the configured cluster
• Accuracy of statistics needs improvement
• Assumes DRS is enabled in vCenter for the cluster
• Scheduler looks at statistics of the first host in the cluster
• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/vmware-compute-driver

8. Demo

9. Sources
Openstack grizzly :
https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master
VMware's patch for compute driver for grizzly-1:
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/16497/
VMware’s compute driver blue print :
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/vmware-compute-driver
VMware’s patch for vcenter support :
https://review.openstack.org/#/c/19483/

10. Questions ?