openstack team mailing list archive

[Ewan Mellor <Ewan.Mellor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It calls XenServer using its remote API.  The built-in API is used for most operations, and there are plugins for a few extensions (see http://wiki.openstack.org/XenServerDevelopment#Test_XenAPI and http://wiki.openstack.org/XenServerDevelopment#Prepare_XenServer).

Cheers,

Ewan.

From: Balaji Venkataraman [mailto:xbalaji@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 18 September 2011 22:37
To: Ewan Mellor
Cc: Rafi Khardalian; Todd Deshane; openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Openstack] openstack for citrix xenserver 5.6 SP2

Thanks for clarifying, I've missed this if it were documented somewhere. Now one follow up question to this is, how does a nova-code create another vm, if it is not in control domain? Is that explained somewhere?

Thanks and Regards,
Balaji
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Ewan Mellor <Ewan.Mellor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:Ewan.Mellor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
That's not how we set it up, no.  We use a service VM so that we can isolate Nova from XenServer's control domain.

This gives us better

*         fault tolerance - we can restart the whole VM if we need to, without disturbing the rest of the host

*         performance isolation - we can impose quality-of-service restrictions on the service VM, and

*         security - the two control planes can be isolated.

It also means that we can run a modern distro in the service VM while the control domain stays with something older and stable.

Cheers,

Ewan.

From: Balaji Venkataraman [mailto:xbalaji@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:xbalaji@xxxxxxxxx>]
Sent: 18 September 2011 22:21
To: Ewan Mellor
Cc: Rafi Khardalian; Todd Deshane; openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject: Re: [Openstack] openstack for citrix xenserver 5.6 SP2

Thanks for your reply. Isn't nova-node installed on the Hypervisor directly? Is there something I've failed to understand?

Thanks and Regards,
Balaji
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Ewan Mellor <Ewan.Mellor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:Ewan.Mellor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Plenty of people are using OpenStack with XenServer in major deployments, including Rackspace and Citrix.  If you're struggling to get it working, then I apologise for our poor documentation!  We'd certainly like to understand why so that we can fix the problem.  I've cc'd Todd Deshane at Xen.org, who has been working on this recently too.

To start with, I think that you're going about it completely the wrong way.  The instructions are set up for a virtual machine running the Nova components, with only a few minor modifications to XenServer itself (the addition of a few plugins).  If you're compiling apt-get from source then you are definitely going to fail!  You should start with a VM and install Nova there (Ubuntu Maverick works well if you're following those instructions below, though anything with Python 2.6 should work with enough effort).

I can also tell you that XenServer 6.0 will be released in approximately one week (it has already left engineering).  That release has a number of major improvements targeted at OpenStack, including a massive performance boost on the networking side and new versions of Xen and the Open vSwitch.  I strongly recommend working with XS 6.

Cheers,

Ewan Mellor,
Director, Engineering, OpenStack at Citrix.

From: openstack-bounces+ewan.mellor=citrix.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:citrix.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [mailto:openstack-bounces+ewan.mellor<mailto:openstack-bounces%2Bewan.mellor>=citrix.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:citrix.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>] On Behalf Of Balaji Venkataraman
Sent: 18 September 2011 21:00
To: Rafi Khardalian
Cc: openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Openstack] openstack for citrix xenserver 5.6 SP2

Rafi:

Thanks for the link, I looked at it earlier, from what I understand the wiki page assumes
a Type 2 Hypervisor. My idea is to make Citrix Xenserver  (Type 1 Hypervisor) as a
nova-node. I spent sometime on this but was going no  where. Installed gcc, g++, make
etc  to compile apt-get from source on Xenserver. Then ran into issues as apt-get
expects some files which are missing in Xenserver.

Hope someone can shed some light, I see openstack claims support in Xenserver but
is it on a standard Xenserver downloaded from Citrix or a custom built Xenserver?

Thanks and Regards,
Balaji
On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 6:43 PM, Rafi Khardalian <rafi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:rafi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
The only document covering the subject is here:

http://wiki.openstack.org/XenServerDevelopment

Support for Xenserver seems more like a work-in-progress than anything I would consider using in a production environment.  XAPI plugins need to be installed on each hypervisor's dom0 with an associated nova-compute instance also running as a domU (one per pool is not sufficient, AFAIK).  After battling with it for almost a week, I gave up and decided to go with KVM.  Thus far I've been rather pleased with the combination.

If anyone has more information about this, I'd be happy to be wrong.

Rafi


On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Balaji Venkataraman <xbalaji@xxxxxxxxx<mailto:xbalaji@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:


We are trying to configure citrix xenserver as nova-node, but we are not able to install the nova tools, is this supported? If so, can someone share the details or point to the wiki page.


Thanks and Regards,
Balaji