We had a single unconference session this time at the Ocata summit. The full etherpad is here:

https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ocata-nova-summit-unconference

We spent most of the session talking about three newly proposed virt drivers.

IBM PowerVM
-----------

The PowerVM driver has been getting developed out of the nova tree but in the openstack namespace for a couple of years now. The team working on it has been attending summits and meetups providing status and working on CI. There are some users. There is a spec proposed:

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/381772/

to start adding in some of the minimum required functionality for an in-tree driver and start running the PowerVM CI on Nova changes.

There was quite a bit of discussion in the room about the driver, like whether or not it requires cinder/neutron plugins (it doesn't), but ultimately there was general agreement on the plan to ease the driver in and iterate on adding feature parity from the out of tree driver to nova in later releases.

IBM zDPM
--------

This was more socializing the driver and Q&A about it. There is no code so nothing really to talk about getting in tree. There was a note that it takes 10 minutes to create a server, which raised some questions.

The direction here was basically follow the PowerVM driver model, which is work on the driver in the open, work on CI, work on customers, and attend developer events / stay involved in the Nova community to provide updates on status.

Huawei FusionCompute
--------------------

This is a driver that Huawei has had for their FusionSphere product, since around the Folsom release. The code has been made available on github. It requires a cinder driver but not a neutron ML2 plugin.

The general feeling on this driver was it's not a good fit for Nova given it's an abstraction to an entire other virtualization management system, sort of like vCenter or PowerVC. That kind of architecture raises issues with resource tracking and state management and while yes the vCenter driver is in nova, the architecture it relies on has been problematic and we don't really want to make the same mistake with more virt drivers.

There was some feedback on the other side of this to the effect that if there are customers / users of the FusionCompute driver, why would we not allow it into Nova - and if there are limitations with it then it's up to the vendor to deal with them, or the users to have to live with them. This is a debate that isn't likely to go away anytime soon given the platform9/omni demo at the summit which is essentially a virt driver for AWS.

So while it doesn't look probable for this driver to get into Nova, at least anytime soon, it is in Huawei's best interest to develop the driver in the open and work on CI.

Generalize PCI device as Host device
------------------------------------

This was a spec mentioned during the session:

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/385810/

The intent is to generalize host PCI devices are modeled in Nova so that new types can be built into that model for new support, like for vGPUs.

There wasn't a lot of discussion on this during the session, and not all of the best people to weigh in on this were in the room, so the direction was to move discussion to the spec and get the SR-IOV/PCI/resource provider people like lbeliveau, jaypipes and moshele to review the spec.

--

Thanks,

Matt Riedemann


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