Greetings Michael, I believe It would need to involve multiple machines at the same time.
I guess there are two different approaches that I think _could_ be taken to facilitate this: 1) Provide a facility to use a specific volume as the "golden volume" to boot up for IPA, and then initiate copies of that volume. The downside that I see is the act of either copying the volume, or presenting a snapshot of it that will be deleted a little later. I think that is really going to depend on the back-end, and if the backend can handle it or not. :\ 2) The other possibility that I'm wondering is if we boot machines to a read-only "golden volume", with a bootloader and a ramdisk that ends up switching root over to a file stored on the filesystem being mounted via the loopback. It seems evil, but I think it should work just fine and does not involve as much network traffic as copying all of the contents of a huge ramdisk over the wire into RAM. Of course, then the problem is keeping kernels/drivers in sync... I guess the question becomes, what is more appealing from an operator standpoint, in terms of care and feeding. I suspect #2 would involve some very specific ramdisk modifications, which may not improve the hurdle being encountered with iterating with drivers faster. I can't help but wonder if the headache is building an image with dib, uploading it, then updating the node driver_info, and then deploying to that node again. Maybe if we could have dib write a fully formed image out to an iscsi target... Maybe that might make the world moderately happy? The more I think about it, the more I like #1 from a simplicity standpoint that we could iterate upon, we would just likely have to classify the feature as "very experimental" and stress operational behavior issues that would/could arise, and maybe at some point provide some tunable behavior settings as we better understand needs. -Julia On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 6:45 PM, Michael Still <mi...@stillhq.com> wrote: > Thanks for this summary. I'd say the cinder-booted IPA is definitely of > interest to the operators I've met. Building new IPAs, especially when > trying to iterate on what drivers are needed is a pain so being able to > iterate faster would be very useful. That said, I guess this implies booting > more than one machine off a volume at once? > > Michael > __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: openstack-dev-requ...@lists.openstack.org?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev