6.7 KiB
Nova-LXD Exclusive Machine
As LXD is a system container format, it is possible to provision "bare metal" machines with nova-lxd without exposing the kernel and firmware to the tenant. This is done by means of host aggregates and flavor assignment. The instance will fill the entirety of the host, and no other instances will be assigned to it.
This document describes the method used to achieve this exclusive machine scheduling. It is meant to serve as an example; the names of flavors and aggregates may be named as desired.
Prerequisites
Exclusive machine scheduling requires two scheduler filters to be enabled in scheduler_default_filters in nova.conf, namely AggregateInstanceExtraSpecsFilter and AggregateNumInstancesFilter.
If juju was used to install and manage the openstack environment, the following command will enable these filters:
juju set nova-cloud-controller scheduler-default-filters="AggregateInstanceExtraSpecsFilter,AggregateNumInstancesFilter,RetryFilter,AvailabilityZoneFilter,CoreFilter,RamFilter,ComputeFilter,ComputeCapabilitiesFilter,ImagePropertiesFilter,ServerGroupAntiAffinityFilter,ServerGroupAffinityFilter"Host Aggregate
Each host designed to be exclusively available to a single instance must be added to a special host aggregate.
In this example, the following is a nova host listing:
user@openstack$ nova host-list
+------------+-----------+----------+
| host_name | service | zone |
+------------+-----------+----------+
| machine-9 | cert | internal |
| machine-9 | scheduler | internal |
| machine-9 | conductor | internal |
| machine-12 | compute | nova |
| machine-11 | compute | nova |
| machine-10 | compute | nova |
+------------+-----------+----------+Create the host aggregate itself. In this example, the aggregate is called "exclusive-machines":
user@openstack$ nova aggregate-create exclusive-machines
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+----------+
| 1 | exclusive-machines | - | | |
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+----------+Two metadata properties are then set on the host aggregate itself:
user@openstack$ nova aggregate-set-metadata 1 aggregate_instance_extra_specs:exclusive=true
Metadata has been successfully updated for aggregate 1.
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+-------------------------------------------------+
| Id | Name | Availability Zone | Hosts | Metadata |
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+-------------------------------------------------+
| 1 | exclusive-machines | - | | 'aggregate_instance_extra_specs:exclusive=true' |
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+-------------------------------------------------+
user@openstack$ nova aggregate-set-metadata 1 max_instances_per_host=1
Metadata has been successfully updated for aggregate 1.
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Id | Name | Availability Zone | Hosts | Metadata |
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 1 | exclusive-machines | - | | 'aggregate_instance_extra_specs:exclusive=true', 'max_instances_per_host=1' |
+----+--------------------+-------------------+-------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------The first aggregate metadata property is the link between the flavor (still to be created) and the compute hosts (still to be added to the aggregate). The second metadata property ensures that nova doesn't ever try to add another instance to this one in (e.g. if nova is configured to overcommit resources).
Now the hosts must be added to the aggregate. Once they are added to the host aggregate, they will not be available for other flavors. This will be important in resource sizing efforts. To add the hosts:
user@openstack$ nova aggregate-add-host exclusive-machines machine-10
Host juju-serverstack-machine-10 has been successfully added for aggregate 1
+----+--------------------+-------------------+--------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Id | Name | Availability Zone | Hosts | Metadata |
+----+--------------------+-------------------+--------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 1 | exclusive-machines | - | 'machine-10' | 'aggregate_instance_extra_specs:exclusive=true', 'max_instances_per_host=1' |
+----+--------------------+-------------------+--------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+Exclusive machine flavors
When planning for exclusive machine flavors, there is still a small amount of various resources that will be needed for nova compute and lxd itself. In general, it's a safe bet that this can be quantified in 100MB of RAM, though specific hosts may need to be configured more closely to their use cases.
In this example, machine-10 has 4096MB of total memory, 2 CPUS, and 500GB of disk space. The flavor that is created will have a quantity of 3996MB of RAM, 2 CPUS, and 500GB of disk.:
user@openstack$ nova flavor-create --is-public true e1.medium 100 3996 500 2
+-----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+
| ID | Name | Memory_MB | Disk | Ephemeral | Swap | VCPUs | RXTX_Factor | Is_Public |
+-----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+
| 100 | e1.medium | 3996 | 500 | 0 | | 2 | 1.0 | True |
+-----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+The e1.medium flavor must now have some metadata set to link it with the exclusive-machines host aggregate.:
user@openstack$ nova flavor-key 100 set exclusive=trueBooting an exclusive instance
Once the host aggregate and flavor have been created, exclusive machines can be provisioned by using the flavor `e1.medium`:
user@openstack$ nova boot --flavor 100 --image $IMAGE exclusiveThe exclusive instance, once provisioned, will fill the entire host machine.