Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-03 Thread Daniel P. Berrange
On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 07:23:19PM +, Alessandro Pilotti wrote:
 
 On 02 Dec 2013, at 04:52 , Kyle Mestery (kmestery) kmest...@cisco.com wrote:
 
  
  
  This is very cool Alessandro, thanks for sharing! Any plans to try and get 
  this
  nova driver upstreamed?
 
 My personal opinion is that drivers should stay outside of Nova in a separate 
 project.

If drivers were to live in separate projects we would be forced to maintain
Nova internal code as stable APIs to avoid breaking drivers during the dev
cycle. This would place a significant burden on Nova development and have a
negative impact on the overal ease of development. It would also discourage
collaboration and sharing of code between virt drivers, which is already a
significant problem today whereby drivers come up with different ways todo
the same thing. If you want to be isolated from the community in a separate
project then expect your code to be broken periodically during development.
If you don't want that, then put the code in tree and be an active part of
the community effort working together, instead of in isolation.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com  -o-http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o- http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org   -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
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Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-03 Thread Russell Bryant
On 12/03/2013 04:27 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 07:23:19PM +, Alessandro Pilotti wrote:

 On 02 Dec 2013, at 04:52 , Kyle Mestery (kmestery) kmest...@cisco.com 
 wrote:



 This is very cool Alessandro, thanks for sharing! Any plans to try and get 
 this
 nova driver upstreamed?

 My personal opinion is that drivers should stay outside of Nova in a 
 separate project.

Oh, so when are we dropping Hyper-V (again) ?  :-)

 If drivers were to live in separate projects we would be forced to maintain
 Nova internal code as stable APIs to avoid breaking drivers during the dev
 cycle. This would place a significant burden on Nova development and have a
 negative impact on the overal ease of development. It would also discourage
 collaboration and sharing of code between virt drivers, which is already a
 significant problem today whereby drivers come up with different ways todo
 the same thing. If you want to be isolated from the community in a separate
 project then expect your code to be broken periodically during development.
 If you don't want that, then put the code in tree and be an active part of
 the community effort working together, instead of in isolation.

I generally agree here.  If a driver wants to be separate, that's fine,
there's nothing stopping you.  It just has to be done with the
understanding that it's build on unstable APIs, and you will need
something to ensure you keep up.  That is probably CI.  And if you're
doing CI on the driver, you've met one of the most difficult requirments
to being in Nova.

Someone may also want to have a driver separate for control reasons.
I'd be surprised if that was really a factor with this particular
driver, though.

-- 
Russell Bryant

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Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-03 Thread Alessandro Pilotti


 On 03.12.2013, at 21:20, Russell Bryant rbry...@redhat.com wrote:
 
 On 12/03/2013 04:27 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 07:23:19PM +, Alessandro Pilotti wrote:
 
 On 02 Dec 2013, at 04:52 , Kyle Mestery (kmestery) kmest...@cisco.com 
 wrote:
 
 This is very cool Alessandro, thanks for sharing! Any plans to try and get 
 this
 nova driver upstreamed?
 
 My personal opinion is that drivers should stay outside of Nova in a 
 separate project.
 
 Oh, so when are we dropping Hyper-V (again) ?  :-)

Now we have two drivers to drop at the price of one!

BTW didn't you want to come to the Hyper-V session in HK to talk about this 
(off)topic? :-)

 
 If drivers were to live in separate projects we would be forced to maintain
 Nova internal code as stable APIs to avoid breaking drivers during the dev
 cycle. This would place a significant burden on Nova development and have a
 negative impact on the overal ease of development. It would also discourage
 collaboration and sharing of code between virt drivers, which is already a
 significant problem today whereby drivers come up with different ways todo
 the same thing. If you want to be isolated from the community in a separate
 project then expect your code to be broken periodically during development.
 If you don't want that, then put the code in tree and be an active part of
 the community effort working together, instead of in isolation.
 
 I generally agree here.  If a driver wants to be separate, that's fine,
 there's nothing stopping you.  It just has to be done with the
 understanding that it's build on unstable APIs, and you will need
 something to ensure you keep up.  That is probably CI.  And if you're
 doing CI on the driver, you've met one of the most difficult requirments
 to being in Nova.
 
 Someone may also want to have a driver separate for control reasons.
 I'd be surprised if that was really a factor with this particular
 driver, though.
 
 -- 
 Russell Bryant
 
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Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-03 Thread Russell Bryant
On 12/03/2013 04:59 PM, Alessandro Pilotti wrote:
 BTW didn't you want to come to the Hyper-V session in HK to talk about this 
 (off)topic? :-)

Yeah.  I'm sorry I couldn't be there.  Conflicts at the design summit
are both tough and unavoidable.  I sometimes have sessions in other
tracks that I *really* need to be in.  For those cases, I always make
sure that there are other nova-core members that are still able to
attend the nova sessions that know my positions on things and that I
trust, and then I sync up with them later on what happened.  This was
the case for the Hyper-V session.

FWIW, the conflict in this case was the Icehouse release schedule 
coordination session, which is pretty much a requirement for all PTLs.

-- 
Russell Bryant

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Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-02 Thread Alessandro Pilotti

On 02 Dec 2013, at 04:52 , Kyle Mestery (kmestery) kmest...@cisco.com wrote:

 On Dec 1, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Alessandro Pilotti 
 apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:
 
 Hi all,
 
 At Cloudbase we are heavily using VMware Workstation and Fusion for 
 development, demos and PoCs, so we thought: why not replacing our automation 
 scripts with a fully functional Nova driver and use OpenStack APIs and Heat 
 for the automation? :-)
 
 Here’s the repo for this Nova driver project: 
 https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/
 
 The driver is already working well and supports all the basic features you’d 
 expect from a Nova driver, including a VNC console accessible via Horizon. 
 Please refer to the project README for additional details.
 The usage of CoW images (linked clones) makes deploying images particularly 
 fast, which is a good thing when you develop or run demos. Heat or Puppet, 
 Chef, etc make the whole process particularly sweet of course. 
 
 
 The main idea was to create something to be used in place of solutions like 
 Vagrant, with a few specific requirements:
 
 1) Full support for nested virtualization (VMX and EPT).
 
 For the time being the VMware products are the only ones supporting Hyper-V 
 and KVM as guests, so this became a mandatory path, at least until EPT 
 support will be fully functional in KVM.
 This rules out Vagrant as an option. Their VMware support is not free and 
 beside that they don’t support nested virtualization (yet, AFAIK). 
 
 Other workstation virtualization options, including VirtualBox and Hyper-V 
 are currently ruled out due to the lack of support for this feature as well.
 Beside that Hyper-V and VMware Workstation VMs can work side by side on 
 Windows 8.1, all you need is to fire up two nova-compute instances.
 
 2) Work on Windows, Linux and OS X workstations
 
 Here’s a snapshot of Nova compute  running on OS X and showing Novnc 
 connected to a Fusion VM console:
 
 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png
 
 3) Use OpenStack APIs
 
 We wanted to have a single common framework for automation and bring 
 OpenStack on the workstations. 
 Beside that, dogfooding is a good thing. :-) 
 
 4) Offer a free alternative for community contributions
 
 VMware Player is fair enough, even with the “non commercial use” limits, etc.
 
 Communication with VMware components is based on the freely available Vix 
 SDK libs, using ctypes to call the C APIs. The project provides a library to 
 easily interact with the VMs, in case it sould be needed, e.g.:
 
 from vix import vixutils
 with vixutils.VixConnection() as conn:
with conn.open_vm(vmx_path) as vm:
vm.power_on()
 
 We though about using libvirt, since it has support for those APIs as well, 
 but it was way easier to create a lightweight driver from scratch using the 
 Vix APIs directly.
 
 TODOs:
 
 1) A minimal Neutron agent for attaching networks (now all networks are 
 attached to the NAT interface).
 2) Resize disks on boot based on the flavor size
 3) Volume attach / detach (we can just reuse the Hyper-V code for the 
 Windows case)
 4) Same host resize
 
 Live migration is not making particularly sense in this context, so the 
 implementation is not planned. 
 
 Note: we still have to commit the unit tests. We’ll clean them during next 
 week and push them.
 
 
 As usual, any idea, suggestions and especially contributions are highly 
 welcome!
 
 We’ll follow up with a blog post with some additional news related to this 
 project quite soon. 
 
 
 This is very cool Alessandro, thanks for sharing! Any plans to try and get 
 this
 nova driver upstreamed?

Thanks Kyle!

My personal opinion is that drivers should stay outside of Nova in a separate 
project. Said that, this driver is way easier to mantain than the Hyper-V one 
for example, so I wouldn’t have objections if this is what the community 
prefers.
On the other side, this driver will hardly have a CI as it’s not a requirement 
for the expected usage and this wouldn’t fit with the current (correct IMO) 
decision that only drivers with a CI gate will stay in Nova starting with 
Icehouse.
Said that, I would’t have of course anything against somebody (VMware?) 
volunteering for the CI. ;-)

IMO, as also Chmouel suggested in this thread, a Stackforge project could be a 
good start. This should make it easier for people to contribute and we’ll have 
a couple of release cycles to decide what to do with it.

Alessandro


 Thanks,
 Kyle
 
 Thanks,
 
 Alessandro
 
 
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Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-02 Thread Alessandro Pilotti

On 02 Dec 2013, at 20:54 , Vishvananda Ishaya 
vishvana...@gmail.commailto:vishvana...@gmail.com wrote:

Very cool stuff!

Seeing your special glance properties for iso and floppy connections made me 
think
of something. They seem, but it would be nice if they were done in a way that 
would
work in any hypervisor.

I think we have sufficient detail in block_device_mapping to do essentially 
the
same thing, and it would be awesome to verify and add some nicities to the nova
cli, something like:


Thanks Vish!

I was also thinking about bringing this to any hypervisor.

About the block storage option, we would have an issue with Hyper-V. We need 
local (or SMB accessible) ISOs and floppy images to be assigned to the 
instances.
IMO this isn’t a bad thing: ISOs would be potentially shared among instances in 
read only mode and it’s easy to pull them from Glance during live migration.
Floppy images on the other hand are insignificant quantity. :-)


nova boot --flavor 1 --iso CentOS-64-ks --floppy Kickstart (defaults to blank 
image)


This would be great! For the reasons above, I’d go anyway with some simple 
extensions to pass in the ISO and floppy refs in the instance data instead of 
block device mappings.

There’s also one additional scenario that would greatly benefit from those 
options: our Windows Heat templates (think about SQL Server, Exchange, etc) 
need to access the product media for installation and due to
license constraints the tenant needs to provide the media, we cannot simply 
download them. So far we solved it by attaching a volume containing the install 
media, but it’s of course a very unnatural process for the user.

Alessandro


Clearly that requires a few things:

1) vix block device mapping support
2) cli ux improvements
3) testing!

Vish

On Dec 1, 2013, at 2:10 PM, Alessandro Pilotti 
apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.commailto:apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:

Hi all,

At Cloudbase we are heavily using VMware Workstation and Fusion for 
development, demos and PoCs, so we thought: why not replacing our automation 
scripts with a fully functional Nova driver and use OpenStack APIs and Heat for 
the automation? :-)

Here’s the repo for this Nova driver project: 
https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/

The driver is already working well and supports all the basic features you’d 
expect from a Nova driver, including a VNC console accessible via Horizon. 
Please refer to the project README for additional details.
The usage of CoW images (linked clones) makes deploying images particularly 
fast, which is a good thing when you develop or run demos. Heat or Puppet, 
Chef, etc make the whole process particularly sweet of course.


The main idea was to create something to be used in place of solutions like 
Vagrant, with a few specific requirements:

1) Full support for nested virtualization (VMX and EPT).

For the time being the VMware products are the only ones supporting Hyper-V and 
KVM as guests, so this became a mandatory path, at least until EPT support will 
be fully functional in KVM.
This rules out Vagrant as an option. Their VMware support is not free and 
beside that they don’t support nested virtualization (yet, AFAIK).

Other workstation virtualization options, including VirtualBox and Hyper-V are 
currently ruled out due to the lack of support for this feature as well.
Beside that Hyper-V and VMware Workstation VMs can work side by side on Windows 
8.1, all you need is to fire up two nova-compute instances.

2) Work on Windows, Linux and OS X workstations

Here’s a snapshot of Nova compute  running on OS X and showing Novnc connected 
to a Fusion VM console:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png

3) Use OpenStack APIs

We wanted to have a single common framework for automation and bring OpenStack 
on the workstations.
Beside that, dogfooding is a good thing. :-)

4) Offer a free alternative for community contributions

VMware Player is fair enough, even with the “non commercial use” limits, etc.

Communication with VMware components is based on the freely available Vix SDK 
libs, using ctypes to call the C APIs. The project provides a library to easily 
interact with the VMs, in case it sould be needed, e.g.:

from vix import vixutils
with vixutils.VixConnection() as conn:
with conn.open_vm(vmx_path) as vm:
vm.power_on()

We though about using libvirt, since it has support for those APIs as well, but 
it was way easier to create a lightweight driver from scratch using the Vix 
APIs directly.

TODOs:

1) A minimal Neutron agent for attaching networks (now all networks are 
attached to the NAT interface).
2) Resize disks on boot based on the flavor size
3) Volume attach / detach (we can just reuse the Hyper-V code for the Windows 
case)
4) Same host resize

Live migration is not making particularly sense in this context, so the 
implementation is not planned.

Note: we still have to commit the unit tests. We’ll clean them during 

Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-02 Thread Vishvananda Ishaya

On Dec 2, 2013, at 11:40 AM, Alessandro Pilotti 
apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:

 
 On 02 Dec 2013, at 20:54 , Vishvananda Ishaya vishvana...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Very cool stuff!
 
 Seeing your special glance properties for iso and floppy connections made me 
 think
 of something. They seem, but it would be nice if they were done in a way 
 that would
 work in any hypervisor.
 
 I think we have sufficient detail in block_device_mapping to do 
 essentially the
 same thing, and it would be awesome to verify and add some nicities to the 
 nova
 cli, something like:
 
 
 Thanks Vish!
 
 I was also thinking about bringing this to any hypervisor.
 
 About the block storage option, we would have an issue with Hyper-V. We need 
 local (or SMB accessible) ISOs and floppy images to be assigned to the 
 instances.
 IMO this isn’t a bad thing: ISOs would be potentially shared among instances 
 in read only mode and it’s easy to pull them from Glance during live 
 migration. 
 Floppy images on the other hand are insignificant quantity. :-)

I'm not sure exactly what the problem is here. Pulling them down from glance 
before boot seems like the way that other hypervisors would implement it as 
well. The block device mapping code was extended in havana so it doesn't just 
support volume/iscsi connections. You can specify where the item should be 
attached in addition to the source of the device (glance, cinder, etc.).

 
 
 nova boot --flavor 1 --iso CentOS-64-ks --floppy Kickstart (defaults to 
 blank image)
 
 
 This would be great! For the reasons above, I’d go anyway with some simple 
 extensions to pass in the ISO and floppy refs in the instance data instead of 
 block device mappings.

I think my above comment handles this. Block device mapping was designed to 
support floppies and ISOs as well

 
 There’s also one additional scenario that would greatly benefit from those 
 options: our Windows Heat templates (think about SQL Server, Exchange, etc) 
 need to access the product media for installation and due to 
 license constraints the tenant needs to provide the media, we cannot simply 
 download them. So far we solved it by attaching a volume containing the 
 install media, but it’s of course a very unnatural process for the user.

Couldn't this also be handled by above i.e. upload the install media to glance 
as an iso instead of a volume?

Vish

 
 Alessandro
 
 
 Clearly that requires a few things:
 
 1) vix block device mapping support
 2) cli ux improvements
 3) testing!
 
 Vish
 
 On Dec 1, 2013, at 2:10 PM, Alessandro Pilotti 
 apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:
 
 Hi all,
 
 At Cloudbase we are heavily using VMware Workstation and Fusion for 
 development, demos and PoCs, so we thought: why not replacing our 
 automation scripts with a fully functional Nova driver and use OpenStack 
 APIs and Heat for the automation? :-)
 
 Here’s the repo for this Nova driver project: 
 https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/
 
 The driver is already working well and supports all the basic features 
 you’d expect from a Nova driver, including a VNC console accessible via 
 Horizon. Please refer to the project README for additional details.
 The usage of CoW images (linked clones) makes deploying images particularly 
 fast, which is a good thing when you develop or run demos. Heat or Puppet, 
 Chef, etc make the whole process particularly sweet of course. 
 
 
 The main idea was to create something to be used in place of solutions like 
 Vagrant, with a few specific requirements:
 
 1) Full support for nested virtualization (VMX and EPT).
 
 For the time being the VMware products are the only ones supporting Hyper-V 
 and KVM as guests, so this became a mandatory path, at least until EPT 
 support will be fully functional in KVM.
 This rules out Vagrant as an option. Their VMware support is not free and 
 beside that they don’t support nested virtualization (yet, AFAIK). 
 
 Other workstation virtualization options, including VirtualBox and Hyper-V 
 are currently ruled out due to the lack of support for this feature as well.
 Beside that Hyper-V and VMware Workstation VMs can work side by side on 
 Windows 8.1, all you need is to fire up two nova-compute instances.
 
 2) Work on Windows, Linux and OS X workstations
 
 Here’s a snapshot of Nova compute  running on OS X and showing Novnc 
 connected to a Fusion VM console:
 
 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png
 
 3) Use OpenStack APIs
 
 We wanted to have a single common framework for automation and bring 
 OpenStack on the workstations. 
 Beside that, dogfooding is a good thing. :-) 
 
 4) Offer a free alternative for community contributions
   
 VMware Player is fair enough, even with the “non commercial use” limits, 
 etc.
 
 Communication with VMware components is based on the freely available Vix 
 SDK libs, using ctypes to call the C APIs. The project provides a library 
 to easily interact with the VMs, in case it 

Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-02 Thread Alessandro Pilotti


On 02/dic/2013, at 23:47, Vishvananda Ishaya 
vishvana...@gmail.commailto:vishvana...@gmail.com wrote:


On Dec 2, 2013, at 11:40 AM, Alessandro Pilotti 
apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.commailto:apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:


On 02 Dec 2013, at 20:54 , Vishvananda Ishaya 
vishvana...@gmail.commailto:vishvana...@gmail.com wrote:

Very cool stuff!

Seeing your special glance properties for iso and floppy connections made me 
think
of something. They seem, but it would be nice if they were done in a way that 
would
work in any hypervisor.

I think we have sufficient detail in block_device_mapping to do essentially 
the
same thing, and it would be awesome to verify and add some nicities to the nova
cli, something like:


Thanks Vish!

I was also thinking about bringing this to any hypervisor.

About the block storage option, we would have an issue with Hyper-V. We need 
local (or SMB accessible) ISOs and floppy images to be assigned to the 
instances.
IMO this isn’t a bad thing: ISOs would be potentially shared among instances in 
read only mode and it’s easy to pull them from Glance during live migration.
Floppy images on the other hand are insignificant quantity. :-)

I'm not sure exactly what the problem is here. Pulling them down from glance 
before boot seems like the way that other hypervisors would implement it as 
well. The block device mapping code was extended in havana so it doesn't just 
support volume/iscsi connections. You can specify where the item should be 
attached in addition to the source of the device (glance, cinder, etc.).

I have to say that I still used it for iSCSI volumes only. If Glance is 
supported, not only all my objections below are irrelevant, but it's also a 
great solution! Adding it right away!




nova boot --flavor 1 --iso CentOS-64-ks --floppy Kickstart (defaults to blank 
image)


This would be great! For the reasons above, I’d go anyway with some simple 
extensions to pass in the ISO and floppy refs in the instance data instead of 
block device mappings.

I think my above comment handles this. Block device mapping was designed to 
support floppies and ISOs as well


There’s also one additional scenario that would greatly benefit from those 
options: our Windows Heat templates (think about SQL Server, Exchange, etc) 
need to access the product media for installation and due to
license constraints the tenant needs to provide the media, we cannot simply 
download them. So far we solved it by attaching a volume containing the install 
media, but it’s of course a very unnatural process for the user.

Couldn't this also be handled by above i.e. upload the install media to glance 
as an iso instead of a volume?

Vish


Alessandro


Clearly that requires a few things:

1) vix block device mapping support
2) cli ux improvements
3) testing!

Vish

On Dec 1, 2013, at 2:10 PM, Alessandro Pilotti 
apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.commailto:apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:

Hi all,

At Cloudbase we are heavily using VMware Workstation and Fusion for 
development, demos and PoCs, so we thought: why not replacing our automation 
scripts with a fully functional Nova driver and use OpenStack APIs and Heat for 
the automation? :-)

Here’s the repo for this Nova driver project: 
https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/

The driver is already working well and supports all the basic features you’d 
expect from a Nova driver, including a VNC console accessible via Horizon. 
Please refer to the project README for additional details.
The usage of CoW images (linked clones) makes deploying images particularly 
fast, which is a good thing when you develop or run demos. Heat or Puppet, 
Chef, etc make the whole process particularly sweet of course.


The main idea was to create something to be used in place of solutions like 
Vagrant, with a few specific requirements:

1) Full support for nested virtualization (VMX and EPT).

For the time being the VMware products are the only ones supporting Hyper-V and 
KVM as guests, so this became a mandatory path, at least until EPT support will 
be fully functional in KVM.
This rules out Vagrant as an option. Their VMware support is not free and 
beside that they don’t support nested virtualization (yet, AFAIK).

Other workstation virtualization options, including VirtualBox and Hyper-V are 
currently ruled out due to the lack of support for this feature as well.
Beside that Hyper-V and VMware Workstation VMs can work side by side on Windows 
8.1, all you need is to fire up two nova-compute instances.

2) Work on Windows, Linux and OS X workstations

Here’s a snapshot of Nova compute  running on OS X and showing Novnc connected 
to a Fusion VM console:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png

3) Use OpenStack APIs

We wanted to have a single common framework for automation and bring OpenStack 
on the workstations.
Beside that, dogfooding is a good thing. :-)

4) Offer a free alternative for community contributions


Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-01 Thread Kyle Mestery (kmestery)
On Dec 1, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Alessandro Pilotti 
apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:
 
 Hi all,
 
 At Cloudbase we are heavily using VMware Workstation and Fusion for 
 development, demos and PoCs, so we thought: why not replacing our automation 
 scripts with a fully functional Nova driver and use OpenStack APIs and Heat 
 for the automation? :-)
 
 Here’s the repo for this Nova driver project: 
 https://github.com/cloudbase/nova-vix-driver/
 
 The driver is already working well and supports all the basic features you’d 
 expect from a Nova driver, including a VNC console accessible via Horizon. 
 Please refer to the project README for additional details.
 The usage of CoW images (linked clones) makes deploying images particularly 
 fast, which is a good thing when you develop or run demos. Heat or Puppet, 
 Chef, etc make the whole process particularly sweet of course. 
 
 
 The main idea was to create something to be used in place of solutions like 
 Vagrant, with a few specific requirements:
 
 1) Full support for nested virtualization (VMX and EPT).
 
 For the time being the VMware products are the only ones supporting Hyper-V 
 and KVM as guests, so this became a mandatory path, at least until EPT 
 support will be fully functional in KVM.
 This rules out Vagrant as an option. Their VMware support is not free and 
 beside that they don’t support nested virtualization (yet, AFAIK). 
 
 Other workstation virtualization options, including VirtualBox and Hyper-V 
 are currently ruled out due to the lack of support for this feature as well.
 Beside that Hyper-V and VMware Workstation VMs can work side by side on 
 Windows 8.1, all you need is to fire up two nova-compute instances.
 
 2) Work on Windows, Linux and OS X workstations
 
 Here’s a snapshot of Nova compute  running on OS X and showing Novnc 
 connected to a Fusion VM console:
 
 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9060190/Nova-compute-os-x.png
 
 3) Use OpenStack APIs
 
 We wanted to have a single common framework for automation and bring 
 OpenStack on the workstations. 
 Beside that, dogfooding is a good thing. :-) 
 
 4) Offer a free alternative for community contributions
   
 VMware Player is fair enough, even with the “non commercial use” limits, etc.
 
 Communication with VMware components is based on the freely available Vix SDK 
 libs, using ctypes to call the C APIs. The project provides a library to 
 easily interact with the VMs, in case it sould be needed, e.g.:
 
 from vix import vixutils
 with vixutils.VixConnection() as conn:
 with conn.open_vm(vmx_path) as vm:
 vm.power_on()
 
 We though about using libvirt, since it has support for those APIs as well, 
 but it was way easier to create a lightweight driver from scratch using the 
 Vix APIs directly.
 
 TODOs:
 
 1) A minimal Neutron agent for attaching networks (now all networks are 
 attached to the NAT interface).
 2) Resize disks on boot based on the flavor size
 3) Volume attach / detach (we can just reuse the Hyper-V code for the Windows 
 case)
 4) Same host resize
 
 Live migration is not making particularly sense in this context, so the 
 implementation is not planned. 
 
 Note: we still have to commit the unit tests. We’ll clean them during next 
 week and push them.
 
 
 As usual, any idea, suggestions and especially contributions are highly 
 welcome!
 
 We’ll follow up with a blog post with some additional news related to this 
 project quite soon. 
 
 
This is very cool Alessandro, thanks for sharing! Any plans to try and get this
nova driver upstreamed?

Thanks,
Kyle

 Thanks,
 
 Alessandro
 
 
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Re: [openstack-dev] VMware Workstation / Fusion / Player Nova driver

2013-12-01 Thread Chmouel Boudjnah
On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 11:10 PM, Alessandro Pilotti 
apilo...@cloudbasesolutions.com wrote:

 We’ll follow up with a blog post with some additional news related to this
 project quite soon.


really cool, I'd love to use that for my apple laptop. It would be nice if
it goes on stackforge which should be easier to contribute.

Chmouel.
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