Libvirt drivers

Overview

This driver implements Power/Management interfaces for virtual baremetal hardware and is based on Libvirt [1] library and its Python interface. Thus it is suited for testing environments only.

It performs considerably better that Ironic’s SSH driver, especially when there are many virtual baremetal nodes placed on hypervizor [2]. It also supports additional connection transports, including TCP with SASL authentication that can be considered as secure alternative to SSH.

Known drawbacks in comparison to Ironic’s SSH driver are:

• no support for user+password SSH authentication
• some use cases possible with SSH driver are not supported
  • e.g. managing VirtualBox VMs on a Windows host from Linux guest

Setting up the environment

1. Install Ironic

2. Install ironic-staging-drivers

3. Install libvirt-python

   • When installing from PyPI, you’d need development version of libvirt package from your distribution (e.g. libvirt-dev in Ubuntu, libvirt-devel in Fedora) and all the usual Python packages required to compile C-extensions in your system (on DevStack, those are already installed when nova-compute is enabled).

4. Add staging-libvirt to the list of enabled_hardware_types in ironic.conf, configure the power and management interfaces, for example:

   [DEFAULT]
   enabled_hardware_types = staging-libvirt
   enabled_management_interfaces = staging-libvirt
   enabled_power_interfaces = staging-libvirt
   

   Then restart the ironic-conductor service.

5. Create or update existing virtual baremetal nodes to use one of libvirt-based drivers enabled in the previous step.

6. Update node properties with driver-specific fields if needed. (see Node driver_info). Default values are suitable for single-node DevStack.

7. Deploy the node.

Node driver_info

libvirt_uri

(optional) Libvirt URI to connect to. Default is qemu+unix:///system.

ssh_key_filename

(optional) File name of private SSH key when using qemu+ssh:// transport. The file must have appropriate permissions for the user running ironic-conductor service. Default is to use default SSH keys for that user. Note that for private keys with password those must be pre-loaded into ssh-agent.

sasl_username

username to authenticate as. Required when using TCP transport with SASL authentication.

sasl_password

password to use for SASL authentication. Required when using TCP transport with SASL authentication.

References

[1]	https://libvirt.org

[2]	https://github.com/pshchelo/ironic_libvirt_vs_virsh