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User Guide
This section provides a deeper explanation of plugin parameters and a description of required steps to verify that everything is working fine after deployment.
Note that this User Guide provides information on 6WIND Virtual Accelerator plugin for Fuel (and not on the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator software itself). Contact 6WIND to obtain more details on how to retrieve the Virtual Accelerator software and its documentation.
When configuring the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel plugin, you have to provide credentials for Virtual Accelerator software download. The plugin will then install and run the Virtual Accelerator using its default configuration values.
Enable 6WIND Virtual Accelerator addon for Mellanox
If your compute nodes use Mellanox NICs you should install the additional 6WIND Virtual Accelerator module. This task is possible using the Enable Mellanox NICs support checkbox in the Web UI.
Thanks to this addon, the Virtual Accelerator will be able to automatically detect and configure these NICs to support the 6WIND network stack.
Configuring 6WIND Virtual Accelerator parameters
The 6WIND Virtual Accelerator plugin makes possible to modify these default configuration parameters before deployment. In order to do this you need to activate the Advanced parameters checkbox in the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel plugin section in the Web UI Settings tab.
At this point some additional fields will show up and you will be able to edit with your desired values.
In particular you can modify the following:
FP_MEMORY
This parameter defines the amount of memory (in MB) you want to reserve for Virtual Accelerator. Sample values are 1024, 512 or 'auto'.
VM_MEMORY
This parameter defines the total amount of memory (in MB) you want to reserve for accelerated virtual machines. Sample values are 2048, 4096, 'auto'.
For all these parameters you can always set value to 'auto' (default value). In this case the plugin will compute the most suitable value according to your system resources.
In some cases you may already have a Virtual Accelerator configuration file. You can upload it to the nodes having the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator role enabled using the dedicated External configuration file for VA field. Note, this file will replace the default Virtual Accelerator configuration file and overload all the defined configuration paramaters.
It is strongly recommended to provide a license file if you have one. Without license the plugin will still correclty install the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator but it will run in evaluation mode (48 hours). At the end of the evaluation period you will experience significant performance degradation and loss of connectivity for your instances since there will be nomore any hugepages backing.
Use updated libvirt and qemu packages
As briefly described in the installation section, in order to correctly spawn virtual machines using the accelerated network stack 6WIND Virtual Accelerator provides, the compute nodes need to run recent versions of libvirt and qemu packages.
By default the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel plugin retrieves and installs its updated libvirt and qemu packages from a remote repository maintained by 6WIND. It is possible to force the plugin to keep the default libvirt and qemu packages provided by the Linux distribution.
To do this simply unselect the Use updated external packages checkbox. Note, default libvirt and qemu packages on MOS 9.0 do not have all the features required for proper 6WIND Virtual Accelerator integration. Thus we strongly advise to keep the Use updated external packages enabled.
Use cpu host emulation for guests
Openstack makes possible to launch instances that emulate compute physical (or virtual) CPU. In order to that libvirt should be configured accordingly via the Nova configuration file.
This plugin offers the possibility to enable/disable such configuration in Nova with a specific option (Host cpu emulation for guests) in the advanced parameters.
Disable security groups
By default Fuel installs Openstack with security groups active to enable traffic filtering between virtual machines. In many cases (including NFV) such filtering is not really necessary and it heavily affects vm to vm traffic performances.
6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel plugin makes possible to disable such security group configuration in both Nova/Neutron via the specific option (Disable neutron securty groups) in the advanced parameters.
Configure hugepages support for virtual machines
In order to benefit from 6WIND Virtual Accelerator high performance networking, hugepages support needs to be enabled in Nova flavors. The plugin does not perform this configuration since it should be still possible to spawn virtual machines that don't need network acceleration.
For this reason end-users have to explicitly configure the Nova flavors they want to use when launching virtual machines for fast networking. In order to that it is enough to enable hugepages support in the desired Nova flavor.
On the controller node type the following command to configure a given flavor:
nova flavor-key flavor set hw:mem_page_size=large
Sanity checks after deployment
The installation section of this document described how to correctly start a Fuel deployment using the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator plugin. At the end of this process the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator and its dependent components should be all up and running.
As first step make sure that the system uses the proper libvirt and qemu versions.
Check libvirt version (should be 1.3.1-1ubuntu6)
aptitude show libvirt-bin | grep VersionCheck qemu version (should be 2.5+dfsg-5ubuntu6)
aptitude show qemu-system-x86 | grep Version
The next step is checking that the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator software and its Openstack extensions have been correctly installed.
Check 6WIND Virtual Accelerator package status (should be State: installed)
aptitude show virtual-accelerator | grep StateCheck 6WIND openstack extensions package status (should be State: installed)
aptitude show 6wind-openstack-extensions | grep State
If this check is successful, verify that that ALL the following services are correctly running (each of them should be start/running):
service virtual-accelerator status service openvswitch-switch status service neutron-openvswitch-agent status service libvirtd status service nova-compute status
If some of the services are not properly running, please restart ALL of them in the same order used before for their status check. Otherwise if everything is active you should be able to correctly spawn virtual machines. To do that please refer to 6WIND Openstack extensions official documentation.
Known issues
The current implementation of the 6WIND Virtual Accelerator plugin uses a credentials package in base64 format for 6WIND software download. This behavior should be replaced using a regular credentials package instead of its base64 encoding. Unfortunately a bug in Fuel (affecting 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0) does not make possible to correctly retrieve this package from the upload utility. https://bugs.launchpad.net/fuel/+bug/1545795