Support for PowerVM Performance Monitoring

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The IBM PowerVM hypervisor provides virtualization on POWER hardware. PowerVM customers can see benefits in their environments by making use of OpenStack. This blueprint outlines implementing Ceilometer-compatible compute agent plugins. These, along with a Nova driver and Neutron agent defined in other blueprints, will provide capability for PowerVM customers to natively monitor utilization and statistics for instances running on OpenStack managed systems.

Problem description

PowerVM supports a variety of Performance Monitoring interfaces within the platform, providing virtual machine and system monitoring data. Today, however, Ceilometer does not collect metrics for virtual machines running on the PowerVM platform. With the proposal of a PowerVM Nova driver it is necessary to extend support for PowerVM into Ceilometer as well.

This blueprint will outlines implementing Ceilometer-compatible compute agent plugins for the PowerVM hypervisor. With this update the Ceilometer compute agent will run on each PowerVM compute node and will poll against the PowerVM REST API to retrieve data on running instances.

Proposed change

This blueprint, along with associated blueprints in Nova and Neutron, plans to bring the PowerVM hypervisor into the OpenStack community.

The Ceilometer compute agent provides a framework that allows hypervisors to integrate support for gathering instance statistics and utilization details into Ceilometer. The proposed change plans to build upon the work that the Ceilometer community has done within the compute agent by adding support for gathering instance data from the PowerVM Performance Monitoring infrastructure.

A new compute agent inspector will be added for PowerVM. This will follow the existing inspector specification and poll PowerVM Performance Monitoring to retrieve instance monitoring data. Data on instance cpu, network, memory, and disk usage will be returned by the inspector when called by the associated pollster. Interactions with PowerVM Performance Monitoring will occur using the PowerVM REST API stack via an open source python wrapper to be defined.

These changes are planned to be developed in StackForge under a powervm project. A separate blueprint will be proposed for the ‘L’ release of OpenStack to promote it to the Ceilometer project. This will allow for a longer period of time to show functional testing and drive maturity.

Until the promotion to the core Ceilometer project is complete, these changes will be marked experimental.

Alternatives

Alternatives include writing a PowerVM-specific compute agent or separate PowerVM-specific compute agent plugins. These solutions do not follow the existing Ceilometer standard for hypervisor instance monitoring, would not fit within broader project goals, and would end up re-implementing logic.

Data model impact

None

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Pipeline impact

This change extends the existing Ceilometer compute agent and should have no Pipeline impact.

Other end user impact

None to the deployer.

For the Kilo release of OpenStack, the administrator will need to obtain the change from StackForge (and understand its experimental status).

Performance/Scalability Impacts

This change should have no impacts to performance or scalability of the system. The amount of data being gathered and processed will be similar to that of the existing libvirt, vmware, and hyper-v inspectors.

Other deployer impact

The cloud administrator will need to refer to documentation on how to configure OpenStack for use with a PowerVM hypervisor.

Assuming the PowerVM REST API and Python wrapper library are available, no additional configuration should be required.

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee: adreznec

Other contributors: thorst kyleh dwarcher

Ongoing maintainer: adreznec

Work Items

• Create a PowerVM-specific inspector in the /ceilometer/compute/virt/powervm folder. Stub out the methods.
• Create a PowerVM helper utility for interfacing with the PowerVM REST API python wrapper.
• Implement inspector calls to match the virt inspector abstraction, making calls against the PowerVM REST API to collect cpu, vnic, disk, and memory statistics.
• Provide extensive unit tests (part of other work items).
• Implement a functional automation server that listens for incoming change set commits from the community and provides a non-gating vote (+1 or -1) on the change.

Future lifecycle

Ongoing maintenance of the PowerVM compute agent inspector will be handled by the IBM OpenStack team over the course of the next two release cycles. In the Kilo timeframe this change will remain in StackForge, with a target of merging in the ‘L’ timeframe and continued maintenance and updates as the Ceilometer architecture requires.

Dependencies

• The Ceilometer compute agent.
• Will utilize the PowerVM REST API specification for management. Will utilize future versions of this specification as it becomes available: http://ibm.co/1lThV9R
• Will build on top of a new open source python binding to previously noted PowerVM REST API. This will be a prerequisite to utilizing the driver.

Testing

Tempest Tests

Since the tempest tests should be implementation-agnostic, the existing tempest tests should be able to run against the PowerVM polling code without issue. This blueprint does not foresee any changes based off this work.

Thorough unit tests will be created with the agent to validate specific functions within this implementation.

Functional Tests

A third party functional test environment will be created. It will monitor for incoming neutron change sets. Once it detects a new change set, it will utilize the existing lifecycle API tests. A non-gating vote (+1 or -1) will be provided with information (logs) based on the result.

API Tests

The REST APIs are not planned to change as part of this. Existing APIs should be valid. All testing is planned within the functional testing system and via unit tests.

Documentation Impact

No documentation additions are anticipated. If the existing developer documentation is updated to reflect more hypervisor-specific items, this agent will follow suit.

References

• Ceilometer Architecture: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ceilometer/architecture.html
• PowerVM REST API Initial Specification (may require a newer version as they become available): http://ibm.co/1lThV9R
• PowerVM Virtualization Introduction and Configuration: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247940.html?Open
• PowerVM Best Practices: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248062.html?Open