Openstack: How to decide hardware capacity?

Question

I'm reading some OpenStack material recently, but didn't get a chance to try yet. I got the sense that Openstack could management a large number of virtual machines via API or dashboard interface. User could easily create/start virtual machines.

Then I come out a confusion. As the underlying computer hardware might vary, some computer maybe only able to host one virtual machine, some maybe ten. When user start a virtual machine, does user manually or Openstack automatically designate a hardware computer to host the virtual machine? In either case, how to decide the hardware computer's capacity? Does Openstack provide the functionality to set capacity attribute of hardware computer?

Answer 1

When you run OpenStack, each physical machine (which OpenStack calls compute hosts) will periodically report how many CPUs it has and how much RAM it has, as well as how many CPUs and how much RAM have been allocated to virtual machines that are currently running.

The OpenStack scheduler uses this information to determine which compute host to run a VM on. First, it checks to see if a host has enough CPUs (by applying the CoreFilter) and enough RAM (by applying the RamFilter). Compute hosts that don't have enough CPUs or RAM available won't even be considered.

Once it has a set of candidate hosts that have enough CPU and RAM, the scheduler needs to pick one of them. By default, the scheduler will use a "spread-first" strategy, allocating VMs to machines that have the most amount of CPU/RAM that isn't currently allocated to VM. It's possible to change this strategy to a "fill-first" behavior, so that the compute host with the least amount of free resources will get allocated first. This is configured by setting the nova.scheduler.least_cost.compute_fill_first_cost_fn parameter.

For more information, see the chapter on scheduling in the OpenStack Compute Admin guide.