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Specialized hardware
Certain workloads require specialized hardware devices that have significant virtualization or sharing challenges. Applications such as load balancers, highly parallel brute force computing, and direct to wire networking may need capabilities that basic OpenStack components do not provide.
Challenges
Some applications need access to hardware devices to either improve performance or provide capabilities that are not virtual CPU, RAM, network, or storage. These can be a shared resource, such as a cryptography processor, or a dedicated resource, such as a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). OpenStack can provide some of these, while others may need extra work.
Solutions
To provide cryptography offloading to a set of instances, you can use Image service configuration options. For example, assign the cryptography chip to a device node in the guest. The OpenStack Command Line Reference contains further information on configuring this solution in the section Image service property keys. A challenge, however, is this option allows all guests using the configured images to access the hypervisor cryptography device.
If you require direct access to a specific device, PCI pass-through enables you to dedicate the device to a single instance per hypervisor. You must define a flavor that has the PCI device specifically in order to properly schedule instances. More information regarding PCI pass-through, including instructions for implementing and using it, is available at https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Pci_passthrough <https://wiki.openstack.org/ wiki/Pci_passthrough#How_to_check_PCI_status_with_PCI_api_patches>.
