VM allocation on Primary Storage

[cdfgallo]

ISSUE TYPE

• Enhancement Request

COMPONENT NAME

Primary Storage

CLOUDSTACK VERSION

N.R.

CONFIGURATION

OS / ENVIRONMENT

SUMMARY

There should be better management regarding resource allocation on primary storages. This could be done by allowing the user to be able to choose the disk offering when creating a VM via template via UI (as already happens when creating a VM via API).

Also the parameter "Preferred storage pool" (preferred.storage.pool) (The UUID of preferred storage pool for allocation.) should be configurable in the Cluster or Zone settings so the admin could always choose the preferred PS for every zone. This could be very useful also during storage migrations.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

EXPECTED RESULTS

ACTUAL RESULTS

[DaanHoogland]

@cdfgallo , this sounds like more than one feature/enhancement request. Are you working on these? If not, and to enhance the chance of those getting implemented, can you split them and expand with screen shots/depiction of the desired situation.

[cdfgallo]

@DaanHoogland you are right, this is an enhancement request. Ok, I will split them.

Ty, Fabio

[shwstppr]

Not sure but could Flexible Tags functionality help in achieving a preferred pool allocation, @JoaoJandre?

[JoaoJandre]

Hello @cdfgallo @shwstppr,

You could use flexible tags to finely choose which hosts receive which VMs and the same with storages and volumes. You can make rules to specifically allow only certain groups of tags into each host/storage. You can read a little more about tags and flexible tags in the documentation. Let me know if you do not understand the docs, and have further questions about flexible tags; I can try to answer them.

However, if you only want preferred and not exclusive hosts/storages, regular tags would do just fine as well.

[vishesh92]

@JoaoJandre I don't have much idea about flexible tags. Can you provide an example rule of how someone can use flexible tags in a way similar to preferred.storage.pool but per zone or cluster instead of an account?

[nvazquez]

Hi @cdfgallo @JoaoJandre @DaanHoogland @shwstppr @vishesh92 I was investigating a bit about this issue:

• For the first part, users are able to choose the prefered pools by overriding the root disk offering (pre-created by an admin, which can contain storage tags matching the storage pools) during the VM creation. This is already possible, what are your suggestions to extend this functionality?
• Currently the preferred.storage.pool setting is granular to accounts, I can draft a PR changing its scope to Zone (or Cluster) and do some testing

[JoaoJandre]

@JoaoJandre I don't have much idea about flexible tags. Can you provide an example rule of how someone can use flexible tags in a way similar to preferred.storage.pool but per zone or cluster instead of an account?

@vishesh92, @nvazquez Sorry for the delayed response, after taking a proper look at the way that the preferred.storage.pool config works, simulating it with tags is somewhat painful. I think that extending the config to zone/cluster scope is an easier approach.

[DaanHoogland]

@JoaoJandre @nvazquez @vishesh92 @cdfgallo , as @weizhouapache mentions in @nvazquez ' PR there is a bit of a conflict between account and cluster settings. How can we resolve this?

[vishesh92]

@JoaoJandre @nvazquez @vishesh92 @cdfgallo , as @weizhouapache mentions in @nvazquez ' PR there is a bit of a conflict between account and cluster settings. How can we resolve this?

This might increase the complexity a bit, the only solution I can think of while maintaining the backward compatibility is to allow adding the same global setting per account & as well as a cluster. And the priority of Account would be higher than that of cluster.