yahoo-eng-team team mailing list archive

[Matthew Booth <mbooth@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Public bug reported:

When booting a VMware instance from an image, guestId is taken from the
vmware_ostype property in glance. If this value is invalid, spawn() will
fail with the error message:

VMwareDriverException: A specified parameter was not correct.

As there are many parameters to CreateVM_Task, this error message does
not help us narrow down the offending one. Unfortunately this error
message is all that vSphere provides us, so we can't do better by
relying on vSphere alone.

As this is a user-editable parameter, we should try harder to provide an
indication of what the error might be. We can do this by validating the
field ourselves. As there is no way I'm aware of to extract a canonical
list of valid guestIds from a running vSphere host, I think we're left
embedding our own list and validating against it. This is not ideal,
because:

1. We will need to update our list for every ESX release
2. A simple list will not take account of the ESX version we're running against (i.e. we may have a list for 5.5, but be running against 5.1, which doesn't support everything on our list)

Consequently, to maintain a loose coupling we should validate the field,
but only warn for values we don't recognise. vSphere will continue to
return its non-specific error message, but there will be an additional
indication of what the root cause might be in the logs.

** Affects: nova
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Engineering Team, which is subscribed to OpenStack Compute (nova).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1357263

Title:
  Unhelpful error message when attempting to boot a guest with an
  invalid guestId

Status in OpenStack Compute (Nova):
  New

Bug description:
  When booting a VMware instance from an image, guestId is taken from
  the vmware_ostype property in glance. If this value is invalid,
  spawn() will fail with the error message:

  VMwareDriverException: A specified parameter was not correct.

  As there are many parameters to CreateVM_Task, this error message does
  not help us narrow down the offending one. Unfortunately this error
  message is all that vSphere provides us, so we can't do better by
  relying on vSphere alone.

  As this is a user-editable parameter, we should try harder to provide
  an indication of what the error might be. We can do this by validating
  the field ourselves. As there is no way I'm aware of to extract a
  canonical list of valid guestIds from a running vSphere host, I think
  we're left embedding our own list and validating against it. This is
  not ideal, because:

  1. We will need to update our list for every ESX release
  2. A simple list will not take account of the ESX version we're running against (i.e. we may have a list for 5.5, but be running against 5.1, which doesn't support everything on our list)

  Consequently, to maintain a loose coupling we should validate the
  field, but only warn for values we don't recognise. vSphere will
  continue to return its non-specific error message, but there will be
  an additional indication of what the root cause might be in the logs.

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