Discovering existing VMS

[shimmo]

How do you get OpenStack to recognise and list existing VMs in the vCenter Server inventory?

[admin]

Hi shimmo

could you provide more details on what you would want to do with existing VMs? For eg: would it be sufficient to export the VMs as OVA and make them Glance images? Or do you want the existing VMs to behave like Nova VMs i.e then we will need to create records in Nova, Neutron and Cinder tables.

What kind of VMs do you have right now in vCenter? Windows/Linux? Single Disk/Multi Disk? How many NICs are on those VMs? Linked Clone/Full Clone? ...

Help me understand the use cases  you have in mind and we can go from there

arvind

[shimmo]

I want to be able to present the OpenStack API to allow DevOps teams to consume and manage existing virtual machines using scripts and HOT templates.

I do not want to export hundreds of existing VMs and make them Glance images.

I have thousands of Windows and Linux VMs, both single disk and multi disk, with one or more NICs. I have very few linked clones.

Some other distros automatically discover existing virtual machines.

[admin]

Thanks. Would you mind helping me with some more questions around workflows for existing VMs.

a. Would you map the existing VMs to a single tenant or want to distribute them among multiple tenants? For eg: you could list all the VMs under a default tenant or allocate some VMs, say DB VMs to specific tenants in OpenStack.

b. If the VM has multiple disks, do you want to split additional disks as Cinder Volumes?

c. Would the IP and MAC address of the VMs need to be preserved? And Neutron should be aware of these IP/MAC addresses?

d. You mentioned that you don't want to convert the VMs to glance images. But every Nova VM has a glance image in its entry. So how do want that to be handled? Just create few golden linux and windows vms, associate them to each VM appropriately?

e. DevOps team would also want images. Usually they create environments for dev/test/staging/prod using the images... So should there be an option to export certain VMs as images. May be not all but some of them as golden images?

Discovering the VMs is one part of it. I am very interested in what all workflows you want after the VMs are discovered.

thanks

arvind

[shimmo]

We need OpenStack to be aware of all of the virtual machines under management, not just the ones that were created by OpenStack. The entries created by the discovery process should support the server actions in the API (add IP, attach volume, create image, evacuate, get console... etc)

http://developer.openstack.org/api-ref-compute-v2.1.html#os-servers-v2.1

The nuances of exactly what would need to be populated in order to achieve this are outside my skill set.

Ideally, existing VMs would be mapped to tenants using either the vCenter server folders, or using a RegEx against the VM names. Defaulting to a single tenant would be better than nothing.

Existing IP addresses and MAC addresses must be respected.

Glance references can either be blank, or default as you suggest.