54 lines
2.6 KiB
XML
54 lines
2.6 KiB
XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
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xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
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xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
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version="5.0"
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xml:id="specialized-hardware">
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<?dbhtml stop-chunking?>
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<title>Specialized hardware</title>
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<para>Certain workloads require specialized hardware devices that
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are either difficult to virtualize or impossible to share.
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Applications such as load balancers, highly parallel brute
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force computing, and direct to wire networking may need
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capabilities that basic OpenStack components do not
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provide.</para>
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<section xml:id="challenges-specialized-hardware">
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<title>Challenges</title>
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<para>Some applications need access to hardware devices to either
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improve performance or provide capabilities that are not
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virtual CPU, RAM, network or storage. These can be a shared
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resource, such as a cryptography processor, or a dedicated
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resource such as a Graphics Processing Unit. OpenStack has
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ways of providing some of these, while others may need extra
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work.</para>
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</section>
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<section xml:id="solutions-specialized-hardware">
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<title>Solutions</title>
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<para>In order to provide cryptography offloading to a set of
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instances, it is possible to use Image Service configuration
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options to assign the cryptography chip to a device node in
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the guest. The <citetitle>OpenStack Command Line
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Reference</citetitle> contains further information on
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configuring this solution in the chapter <link
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xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/cli-reference/content/chapter_cli-glance-property.html">Image
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Service property keys</link> , but it allows all guests using
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the configured images to access the hypervisor cryptography
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device.</para>
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<para>If direct access to a specific device is required, it can be
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dedicated to a single instance per hypervisor through the use
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of PCI pass-through. The OpenStack administrator needs to
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define a flavor that specifically has the PCI device in order
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to properly schedule instances. More information regarding PCI
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pass-through, including instructions for implementing and
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using it, is available at <link
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xlink:href="https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Pci_passthrough#How_to_check_PCI_status_with_PCI_api_patches">
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https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Pci_passthrough</link>.
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</para>
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<mediaobject>
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<imageobject>
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<imagedata contentwidth="4in" fileref="../images/Specialized_Hardware2.png"/>
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</imageobject>
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</mediaobject>
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</section>
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</section>
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