Host aggregates

Host aggregates are a mechanism to further partition an availability zone; while availability zones are visible to users, host aggregates are only visible to administrators. Host aggregates started out as a way to use Xen hypervisor resource pools, but has been generalized to provide a mechanism to allow administrators to assign key-value pairs to groups of machines. Each node can have multiple aggregates, each aggregate can have multiple key-value pairs, and the same key-value pair can be assigned to multiple aggregate. This information can be used in the scheduler to enable advanced scheduling, to set up Xen hypervisor resources pools or to define logical groups for migration.

The nova command-line tool supports the following aggregate-related commands.

Note

These commands are only accessible to administrators. If the username and tenant you are using to access the Compute service do not have the admin role, or have not been explicitly granted the appropriate privileges, you will see one of the following errors when trying to use these commands: ERROR: Policy doesn't allow compute_extension:aggregates to be performed. (HTTP 403) (Request-ID: req-299fbff6-6729-4cef-93b2-e7e1f96b4864) ERROR: Policy doesn't allow compute_extension:hosts to be performed. (HTTP 403) (Request-ID: req-ef2400f6-6776-4ea3-b6f1-7704085c27d1)

One common use case for host aggregates is when you want to support scheduling instances to a subset of compute hosts because they have a specific capability. For example, you may want to allow users to request compute hosts that have SSD drives if they need access to faster disk I/O, or access to compute hosts that have GPU cards to take advantage of GPU-accelerated code.

To configure the scheduler to support host aggregates, the scheduler_default_filters configuration option must contain the AggregateInstanceExtraSpecsFilter in addition to the other filters used by the scheduler. Add the following line to /etc/nova/nova.conf on the host that runs the nova-scheduler service to enable host aggregates filtering, as well as the other filters that are typically enabled:

scheduler_default_filters=AggregateInstanceExtraSpecsFilter,AvailabilityZoneFilter,RamFilter,ComputeFilter

In this example, we configure the Compute service to allow users to request nodes that have solid-state drives (SSDs). We create a new host aggregate called fast-io in the availability zone called nova, we add the key-value pair ssd=true to the aggregate, and then we add compute nodes node1, and node2 to it.

$ nova aggregate-create fast-io nova
+----+---------+-------------------+-------+----------+
| Id | Name    | Availability Zone | Hosts | Metadata |
+----+---------+-------------------+-------+----------+
| 1  | fast-io | nova              |       |          |
+----+---------+-------------------+-------+----------+
$ nova aggregate-set-metadata 1 ssd=true
+----+---------+-------------------+-------+-------------------+
| Id | Name    | Availability Zone | Hosts | Metadata          |
+----+---------+-------------------+-------+-------------------+
| 1  | fast-io | nova              | []    | {u'ssd': u'true'} |
+----+---------+-------------------+-------+-------------------+
$ nova aggregate-add-host 1 node1
+----+---------+-------------------+-----------+-------------------+
| Id | Name    | Availability Zone | Hosts      | Metadata          |
+----+---------+-------------------+------------+-------------------+
| 1  | fast-io | nova              | [u'node1'] | {u'ssd': u'true'} |
+----+---------+-------------------+------------+-------------------+
$ nova aggregate-add-host 1 node2
+----+---------+-------------------+---------------------+-------------------+
| Id | Name    | Availability Zone | Hosts                | Metadata          |
+----+---------+-------------------+----------------------+-------------------+
| 1  | fast-io | nova              | [u'node1', u'node2'] | {u'ssd': u'true'} |
+----+---------+-------------------+----------------------+-------------------+

Next, we use the nova flavor-create command to create a new flavor called ssd.large with an ID of 6, 8GB of RAM, 80GB root disk, and 4 vCPUs.

$ nova flavor-create ssd.large 6 8192 80 4
+----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+-------------+
| ID | Name      | Memory_MB | Disk | Ephemeral | Swap | VCPUs | RXTX_Factor | Is_Public | extra_specs |
+----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+-------------+
| 6  | ssd.large | 8192      | 80   | 0         |      | 4     | 1           | True      | {}          |
+----+-----------+-----------+------+-----------+------+-------+-------------+-----------+-------------+

Once the flavor has been created, we specify one or more key-value pair that must match the key-value pairs on the host aggregates. In this case, there's only one key-value pair, ssd=true. Setting a key-value pair on a flavor is done using the nova-manage instance_type set_key command.

# nova-manage instance_type set_key --name=ssd.large  --key=ssd --value=true

Once it is set, you should see the extra_specs property of the ssd.large flavor populated with a key of ssd and a corresponding value of true.

$ nova flavor-show ssd.large
+----------------------------+-------------------+
| Property                   | Value             |
+----------------------------+-------------------+
| OS-FLV-DISABLED:disabled   | False             |
| OS-FLV-EXT-DATA:ephemeral  | 0                 |
| disk                       | 80                |
| extra_specs                | {u'ssd': u'true'} |
| id                         | 6                 |
| name                       | ssd.large         |
| os-flavor-access:is_public | True              |
| ram                        | 8192              |
| rxtx_factor                | 1.0               |
| swap                       |                   |
| vcpus                      | 4                 |
+----------------------------+-------------------+

Now, when a user requests an instance with the ssd.large flavor, the scheduler will only consider hosts with the ssd=true key-value pair. In this example, that would only be node1 and node2.

When using the XenAPI-based hypervisor, the Compute service uses host aggregates to manage XenServer Resource pools, which are used in supporting live migration. See Configuring Migrations for details on how to create these kinds of host aggregates to support live migration.