VMware vSphere

When you use the VMwareVCDriver (vCenter versions 5.1 and later) with OpenStack Compute, add the following VMware-specific configuration options to the nova.conf file:

[DEFAULT]
compute_driver=vmwareapi.VMwareVCDriver

[vmware]
host_ip=<vCenter host IP>
host_username=<vCenter username>
host_password=<vCenter password>
cluster_name=<vCenter cluster name>
datastore_regex=<optional datastore regex>

Note

vSphere vCenter versions 5.0 and earlier: You must specify the location of the WSDL files by adding the wsdl_location=http://127.0.0.1:8080/vmware/SDK/wsdl/vim25/vimService.wsdl setting to the above configuration. For more information, see vSphere 5.0 and earlier additional set up. Clusters: The vCenter driver can support multiple clusters. To use more than one cluster, simply add multiple cluster_name lines in nova.conf with the appropriate cluster name. Clusters and data stores used by the vCenter driver should not contain any VMs other than those created by the driver. Data stores: The datastore_regex setting specifies the data stores to use with Compute. For example, datastore_regex="nas.*" selects all the data stores that have a name starting with "nas". If this line is omitted, Compute uses the first data store returned by the vSphere API. It is recommended not to use this field and instead remove data stores that are not intended for OpenStack. Reserved host memory: The reserved_host_memory_mb option value is 512 MB by default. However, VMware recommends that you set this option to 0 MB because the vCenter driver reports the effective memory available to the virtual machines.

A nova-compute service can control one or more clusters containing multiple ESX hosts, making nova-compute a critical service from a high availability perspective. Because the host that runs nova-compute can fail while the vCenter and ESX still run, you must protect the nova-compute service against host failures.

	Note
	Many nova.conf options are relevant to libvirt but do not apply to this driver.

You must complete additional configuration for environments that use vSphere 5.0 and earlier. See the section called “vSphere 5.0 and earlier additional set up”.

Upload images to the OpenStack Image Service in VMDK format. The following VMDK disk types are supported:

The following table shows the vmware_disktype property that applies to each of the supported VMDK disk types:

The vmware_disktype property is set when an image is loaded into the OpenStack Image Service. For example, the following command creates a Monolithic Sparse image by setting vmware_disktype to sparse:

$ glance image-create --name="ubuntu-sparse" --disk_format=vmdk \
--container_format=bare --is_public=true \
--property vmware_disktype="sparse" \
--property vmware_ostype="ubuntu64Guest" < ubuntuLTS-sparse.vmdk

Note that specifying thin does not provide any advantage over preallocated with the current version of the driver. Future versions might restore the thin properties of the disk after it is downloaded to a vSphere data store.

Using the qemu-img utility, disk images in several formats (such as, qcow2) can be converted to the VMDK format.

For example, the following command can be used to convert a qcow2 Ubuntu Precise cloud image:

$ qemu-img convert -f qcow2 ~/Downloads/precise-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img \
-O vmdk precise-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.vmdk

VMDK disks converted through qemu-img are always monolithic sparse VMDK disks with an IDE adapter type. Using the previous example of the Precise Ubuntu image after the qemu-img conversion, the command to upload the VMDK disk should be something like:

$ glance image-create --name precise-cloud --is-public=True \
--container-format=bare --disk-format=vmdk \
--property vmware_disktype="sparse" \
--property vmware_adaptertype="ide" < \
precise-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.vmdk

Note that the vmware_disktype is set to sparse and the vmware_adaptertype is set to ide in the previous command.

If the image did not come from the qemu-img utility, the vmware_disktype and vmware_adaptertype might be different. To determine the image adapter type from an image file, use the following command and look for the ddb.adapterType= line:

$ head -20 <vmdk file name>

Assuming a preallocated disk type and an iSCSI lsiLogic adapter type, the following command uploads the VMDK disk:

$ glance image-create --name="ubuntu-thick-scsi" --disk_format=vmdk \
--container_format=bare --is_public=true \
--property vmware_adaptertype="lsiLogic" \
--property vmware_disktype="preallocated" \
--property vmware_ostype="ubuntu64Guest" < ubuntuLTS-flat.vmdk

Currently, OS boot VMDK disks with an IDE adapter type cannot be attached to a virtual SCSI controller and likewise disks with one of the SCSI adapter types (such as, busLogic, lsiLogic) cannot be attached to the IDE controller. Therefore, as the previous examples show, it is important to set the vmware_adaptertype property correctly. The default adapter type is lsiLogic, which is SCSI, so you can omit the vmware_adaptertype property if you are certain that the image adapter type is lsiLogic.

In a mixed hypervisor environment, OpenStack Compute uses the hypervisor_type tag to match images to the correct hypervisor type. For VMware images, set the hypervisor type to vmware. Other valid hypervisor types include: xen, qemu, kvm, lxc, uml, and hyperv.

$ glance image-create --name="ubuntu-thick-scsi" --disk_format=vmdk \
--container_format=bare --is_public=true \
--property vmware_adaptertype="lsiLogic" \
--property vmware_disktype="preallocated" \
--property hypervisor_type="vmware" \
--property vmware_ostype="ubuntu64Guest" < ubuntuLTS-flat.vmdk

Monolithic Sparse disks are considerably faster to download but have the overhead of an additional conversion step. When imported into ESX, sparse disks get converted to VMFS flat thin provisioned disks. The download and conversion steps only affect the first launched instance that uses the sparse disk image. The converted disk image is cached, so subsequent instances that use this disk image can simply use the cached version.

To avoid the conversion step (at the cost of longer download times) consider converting sparse disks to thin provisioned or preallocated disks before loading them into the OpenStack Image Service. Below are some tools that can be used to pre-convert sparse disks.

The ESX hypervisor requires a copy of the VMDK file in order to boot up a virtual machine. As a result, the vCenter OpenStack Compute driver must download the VMDK via HTTP from the OpenStack Image Service to a data store that is visible to the hypervisor. To optimize this process, the first time a VMDK file is used, it gets cached in the data store. Subsequent virtual machines that need the VMDK use the cached version and don't have to copy the file again from the OpenStack Image Service.

Even with a cached VMDK, there is still a copy operation from the cache location to the hypervisor file directory in the shared data store. To avoid this copy, boot the image in linked_clone mode. To learn how to enable this mode, see the section called “Configuration reference”. Note also that it is possible to override the linked_clone mode on a per-image basis by using the vmware_linked_clone property in the OpenStack Image Service.

You can configure the nova.conf file to automatically purge unused images after a specified period of time. The relevant settings in the DEFAULT section are:

When you use the VMwareESXDriver (no vCenter) with OpenStack Compute, add the following VMware-specific configuration options to the nova.conf file:

[DEFAULT]
compute_driver=vmwareapi.VMwareESXDriver

[vmware]
host_ip=<ESXi host IP>
host_username=<ESXi host username>
host_password=<ESXi host password>
wsdl_location=http://127.0.0.1:8080/vmware/SDK/wsdl/vim25/vimService.wsdl

Remember that you will have one nova-compute service for each ESXi host. It is recommended that this host run as a VM on the same ESXi host that it manages.

	Note
	Many nova.conf options are relevant to libvirt but do not apply to this driver.

The ESXDriver cannot use many of the vSphere platform advanced capabilities, namely vMotion, high availability, and DRS.