[rhos-list] Optimizing IT: Red Hat Virtual Event

[Ian McLeod]

(Note.  I am not on rhos-list and cannot find it on the mailman web
interface internally.  My replies to the list are bouncing.)

On Wed, 2012-12-05 at 17:59 -0500, Perry Myers wrote:
> On 12/05/2012 05:34 PM, Steve Loranz wrote:
> >> If anyone got a work script that uses OZ to build, then push images
> >> into Glance, please share.
> > 
> > This is exactly what imagefactory will do for you.
> > 
> > Please realize that imagefactory is plugin based. Our current OS
> > plugins pretty much just wrap Oz. The Cloud plugins take the
> > resulting OS images and manage whatever needs to be done to prepare
> > them for and push them to the cloud. If all you want is Openstack,
> > then only install the Openstack cloud plugin. This was done precisely
> > to decouple different areas of the code and make it easier for
> > developers focused on a specific OS or a specific cloud to work on
> > supporting that OS or cloud. For the user it allows imagefactory to
> > be as focused or as flexible as needed.
> 
> One thing that might be useful would be to have IF/Oz utilize an
> OpenStack VM to do the image building vs. using a standalone kvm host.
> Is this something that could be done?

The short answer is "Probably, with modifications." 

Oz uses libvirt and has some baked in assumptions about talking to a
local KVM or emulated QEMU machine.  We could likely tease these out and
use a VM provided by Nova.  JRD asked me a couple of days ago to look
into this in more detail.  I've yet to do so.  Apologies.  A further
complication is that both Oz and Factory make fairly heavy use of
libguestfs, which also benefits from fast local virt and cannot easily
be offloaded to an external VM.

Another potential short answer is "Yes, effortlessly, if you can provide
a VM container that enables nested virt."  

This would require a manual bootstrap of the utility image containing
Factory/Oz.  However, once in place this presents some intriguing
options for horizontal scaling.  An "image building 'deployable'"
perhaps?

-- 
Ian McLeod - Red Hat
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