openstack team mailing list archive

["Chris Bartels" <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

 

I've currently got my laptop & all its accessories for sale on eBay in hopes
of selling it so that I can raise money with which to purchase a cheap, used
server for the purpose of installing OpenStack on OpenStack. This so that I
can tinker with it & get my head wrapped around utilizing OpenStack in a HA
clustered configuration with Landscape & Juju in the new Ubuntu.

 

It appears that the server I had hoped to be able to buy, which had the kind
of Xeon processor which featured VT-x extensions, will likely be sold out by
the time my laptop sells, and this leaves me with some other, less desirable
servers available to me in my price range, some of which feature the older
kind of Xeon processor which do not feature the VT-x virtualization
technology.

 

I don't know if I should consider these as servers I might want to purchase
for my purposes- they could be a great value if they'll work with a nested
OpenStack setup.

 

It has been my experience, at least with ProxmoxVE, which is a KVM-based
bare-metal hypervisor distro, that when I would run ProxmoxVE nested inside
a ProxmoxVE, I wouldn't have KVM available to use in the nested OS, since
the required VT-x virtualization extensions were only available to the OS
that was installed to the bare metal, & not to the nested OS. They didn't
forward to the nested OS.

 

My question to you, is whether I'll be able to run KVM in a nested OpenStack
inside OpenStack when the VT-x is only available to the OpenStack that's
installed to the bare metal.

 

So, if the nested OpenStack doesn't need the VT-x to be forwarded to it by
the OpenStack that's installed to the bare metal, then does the OpenStack
that's installed to the bare metal require the VT-x extensions at all
either? Could I run KVM in both bare metal & nested tiers without VT-x being
present at all?

 

These wouldn't be production servers, so I don't care much about speed,
although I wouldn't be buying any whose CPU was less than 3.3GHz, so should
they be running fully emulated, I wouldn't mind the performance hit, because
their purpose is simply to allow me to familiarize myself with using
OpenStack in various configurations before I go & install it in a production
environment on high quality servers- in a year or 2 from now.

 

 

 

tl;dr-

1.       Does the nested KVM running inside the OpenStack that runs inside
another OpenStack get to take advantage of the VT-x of the host CPU?

2.       Does OpenStack on OpenStack running KVM in each need VT-x on the
host CPU at all to run properly?

 

Please advise.

 

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

Kindest Regards,

Chris Bartels