Nova - Compute Service

Nova is a core service in OpenStack, and provides compute services. Typically this is via Virtual Machines (VMs), but may also be via bare metal servers if Nova is coupled with Ironic.

Nova is enabled by default, but may be disabled by setting enable_nova to no in globals.yml.

Virtualisation Drivers

The virtualisation driver may be selected via nova_compute_virt_type in globals.yml. Supported options are qemu, kvm, and vmware. The default is kvm.

Libvirt

Information on the libvirt-based drivers kvm and qemu can be found in Libvirt - Nova Virtualisation Driver.

VMware

Information on the VMware-based driver vmware can be found in VMware - Nova Virtualisation Driver.

Bare Metal

Information on using Nova with Ironic to deploy compute instances to bare metal can be found in Ironic - Bare Metal provisioning.

Fake Driver

The fake driver can be used for testing Nova’s scaling properties without requiring access to a large amount of hardware resources. It is covered in Nova Fake Driver.

Consoles

The console driver may be selected via nova_console in globals.yml. Valid options are none, novnc and spice. Additionally, serial console support can be enabled by setting enable_nova_serialconsole_proxy to yes.

Cells

Information on using Nova Cells V2 to scale out can be found in Nova Cells.

Vendordata

Nova supports passing deployer provided data to instances using a concept known as Vendordata. If a Vendordata file is located in the following path within the Kolla configuration, Kolla will automatically use it when the Nova service is deployed or reconfigured: /etc/kolla/config/nova/vendordata.json.

Failure handling

Compute service registration

During deployment, Kolla Ansible waits for Nova compute services to register themselves. By default, if a compute service does not register itself before the timeout, that host will be marked as failed in the Ansible run. This behaviour is useful at scale, where failures are more frequent.

Alternatively, to fail all hosts in a cell when any compute service fails to register, set nova_compute_registration_fatal to true.