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 -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Yahoo! 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. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1357263/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~yahoo-eng-team Post to : yahoo-eng-team@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~yahoo-eng-team More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp