Logan you are correct. We currently have a limitation on placing system vms and 
VRs on dedicated resources. They do not strictly adhere to dedication.
It would be good if you could please file Jira tickets regarding the proposed 
enhancements so that we can track it.

Thanks,
Saksham

-----Original Message-----
From: Logan Barfield [mailto:lbarfi...@tqhosting.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2014 11:35 PM
To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org
Subject: Cluster/Host dedication logic

I was doing some testing with the explicit and implicit dedication features, 
and was just wondering about the logic behind it.

From a service provider perspective this feature seems most useful for 
dedicating certain resources to a domain or account.  In other words, a client 
pays for a single host/cluster of hosts, and all their instances are isolated 
on those hosts.

Right now if a host/cluster is explicitly dedicated system VMs will ignore that 
dedication and deploy on the dedicated hosts anyway.  This isn't ideal because 
the system VMs consume resources dedicated (and being paid for) by a single 
client.  That being said the system VMs have to get deployed somewhere, so this 
is probably the best solution overall.

To get around this issue a host can be implicitly dedicated.  In this case only 
VMs specifically deployed by the dedicated user will be provisioned on their 
resources.  This prevents unwanted resource consumption on the dedicated 
infrastructure.  However, this causes the opposite problem with virtual 
routers.  The dedicated client's virtual router is deployed on shared 
resources, instead of their dedicated infrastructure.  This isn't ideal, 
because a customer paying for dedicated resources can be negatively impacted by 
an issue with the shared hosts (e.g., host running their VR goes down causing 
network outages).

Would it be hard to change the implicit dedication logic to allow the virtual 
router owned by an account to reside on their implicitly dedicated resources, 
or even to prefer those resources?  This would ensure that a client paying for 
dedicated resources would only be affected by outages on their own hardware.  
If a console proxy or secondary storage VM goes down they would still be 
affected, but that's a much less urgent/immediately visible problem than losing 
a virtual router.

I know the implicit dedication manager views virtual routers as being owned by 
the "system" right now, but since they are tied to a specific account I don't 
think this change would be too hard to implement.

Is my logic sound on this, or is there something I'm not considering?


Thank You,

Logan Barfield
Tranquil Hosting

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