[Sheepdog] Current OpenStack compatibility for sheepdog?

[MORITA Kazutaka]

At Wed, 2 Nov 2011 13:56:34 -0000,
Matthew Law wrote:
> 
> On Wed, November 2, 2011 1:05 pm, MORITA Kazutaka wrote:
> > At Wed, 2 Nov 2011 12:27:08 -0000,
> > Matthew Law wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> What is the current status of sheepdog with regard to using it for
> >> bootable VM storage in openstack?  I remember work was being proposed on
> >> this but has it been done?
> >
> > Yes, it has been done.  IIUC, you can boot VMs from Sheepdog volumes
> > with EC2 API.  I'm not sure OpenStack API supports booting from
> > volumes.
> 
> That's great.  I'll dig into that some more.
> 
> >>
> >> Looking at the documentation online, I think perhaps Sheepdog has a lot
> >> more features now than are widely publicised.  Can I volunteer to update
> >> some documentation to put this right? :-)  Perhaps a new walkthrough of
> >> sheepdog's features is in order?
> >
> > Great!  Currently, AFAIK, no one is working on that.  It would be
> > really helpful. :)
> 
> I can't help with code as I am more of a web developer and sysadmin but I
> do a lot of testing, scripting and docs in the $dayjob so I think I can
> contribute that way.  The reason I asked about openstack is because I
> think it is worth documenting if sheepdog can be used with things like
> openstack.
> 
> In fact, if sheepdog worked with openstack, opennebula, eucalyptus and
> ganeti out of the box that would probably cover the most popular
> cloud/cluster management tools currently in use and raise the profile of
> sheepdog too, which can only be a good thing.

Personally, I'd like to integrate with CloudStack too.

> 
> I will be looking at how ganeti integrates DRBD this weekend with a view
> to working on some patches to allow sheepdog to be used as well.  Fingers
> crossed!

Great, thanks!

> 
> Final question today: can you please remind me what the issues were with
> creating a block driver for Xen -was it the difference between the Xen
> version of qemu and the KVM version?  Is this possible and where would the
> changes need to be made to make sheepdog equally support Xen and KVM?

Yes, if we add a blktap driver for Sheepdog, we can use Sheepdog from
Xen-based virtual machines, I guess.  There is no technical reason we
can't use Sheepdog VDIs from other clients.  I hope someone would work
on implementing the Xen blktap driver. :)

Thanks,

Kazutaka