nova-specs/specs/liberty/implemented/allocation-ratio-to-resource-tracker.rst

Move allocation ratios to resource tracker

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/allocation-ratio-to-resource-tracker

Move the definition and calculation of allocation ratios out of the scheduler and into the resource tracker.

Problem description

Allocation ratios are currently improperly defined in the scheduler. This leads to efficiency problems due to the scheduler interfacing with the database when it does not need to as well as recalculating adjusted resource usage numbers when it does not need to.

The memory and CPU allocation ratios are currently controlled on a global or per-aggregate basis, with the global configuration settings determined in the core_filter and ram_filter filter modules in the scheduler, and the per-aggregate allocation ratio overrides are stored in the aggregates table in the database, with the core_filter scheduler filter performing repeated lookups to the aggregates table to determine the allocation ratio to use when host aggregates are in use in the deployment.

Allocation ratios are NOT scheduler policy, and should neither be defined nor queried in the scheduler at all. Allocation ratios are simply a way for a compute node to advertise that it has the ability to service more resources than it physically has available: an overcommit ratio. Therefore, not only does the total advertised amount of resources on a compute node NOT need to be recalculated on each run of the scheduler to find a compute node for an instance, but the resource tracker is the most appropriate place to set the available resource amounts.

Use Cases

Operator want to specify allocation ratios per compute node

Project Priority

Priorities have not yet defined for Liberty, but this spec should be related to the former Kilo 'scheduler' priority effort.

Proposed change

We propose to move the definition of CPU and memory allocation ratios out of the scheduler filters where they are currently defined (core_filter and ram_filter) and into the resource tracker (nova.compute.resource_tracker).

Further, we propose to remove all calculation of the compute node's overcommit ratio for both CPU and RAM out of core_filter.py and ram_filter.py.

This calculation will initially be moved into the host_manager.HostManager class, which will store the real and adjusted available resource amounts for each compute node in its collection of HostState structs. Because the current resource tracker in Nova only accounts for a single compute node, we must, for now, use the scheduler's internal resource tracker (HostManager) to track all compute nodes' allocation ratios.

As now host aggregate information for each compute node is provided into HostState, we can direcly get the related overcommit ratios. If the compute node belongs to any host aggregates, then the overcommit ratio for CPU and memory shall be either the lowest ratio set for any of the host aggregates OR the default global configuration ratio value.

The long-term goal is to enable each compute node in the system to have its own settable allocation ratios and remove the need for this particular check or calculation in the resource tracker or the scheduler itself. My personal end goal is to align the scheduler's internal resource tracker with the code in nova.compute.resource_tracker, but this particular blueprint is scoped only to the relatively minor changes described above.

Alternatives

None

Data model impact

None

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

None

Performance Impact

Even with the relatively minor changes introduced here, there should be a performance increase for a single scheduler request due to fewer calculations being made in each scheduler request. For deployments that use host aggregates, performance improvements will be much greater, as the number of DB queries per scheduler request will be reduced.

Other deployer impact

None

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Work Items

• Move the definition of the allocation ratios out of the filters and into nova.compute.resource_tracker
• Provide ram_allocation_ratio and cpu_allocation_ratio as new fields for the ComputeNode object ans the DB compute_nodes model
• Change the behavior in HostManager.get_all_host_states() to calculate resources available from either the host aggregate's min ratio or the global definition ratio populated correctly in HostState

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

sylvain-bauza

Dependencies

None

Testing

Some minor adjustments to the existing unit tests would need to be performed.

Documentation Impact

None

References

Mailing list discussion:

http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-June/036602.html