Host aggregates

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

Note

Only administrators can access these commands. If you try to use these commands and the user name and tenant that you use to access the Compute service do not have the admin role or the appropriate privileges, these errors occur: 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

This example configures the Compute service to enable users to request nodes that have solid-state drives (SSDs). You create a fast-io host aggregate in the nova availability zone and you add the ssd=true key-value pair to the aggregate. Then, you add the node1, and node2 compute nodes 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'} |
+----+---------+-------------------+----------------------+-------------------+

Use the nova flavor-create command to create the ssd.large flavor called 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 is created, specify one or more key-value pairs that match the key-value pairs on the host aggregates. In this case, that is the ssd=true key-value pair. Setting a key-value pair on a flavor is done using the nova flavor-key set_key command.

# nova flavor-key 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 only considers hosts with the ssd=true key-value pair. In this example, these are 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.