Libvirt - Nova Virtualisation Driver¶
Overview¶
Libvirt is the most commonly used virtualisation driver in OpenStack. It uses
libvirt, backed by QEMU and when available, KVM. Libvirt is executed in the
nova_libvirt
container.
Hardware Virtualisation¶
Two values are supported for nova_compute_virt_type
with libvirt -
kvm
and qemu
, with kvm
being the default.
For optimal performance, kvm
is preferable, since many aspects of
virtualisation can be offloaded to hardware. If it is not possible to enable
hardware virtualisation (e.g. Virtualisation Technology (VT) BIOS configuration
on Intel systems), qemu
may be used to provide less performant
software-emulated virtualisation.
SASL Authentication¶
The default configuration of Kolla Ansible is to run libvirt over TCP, authenticated with SASL. This should not be considered as providing a secure, encrypted channel, since the username/password SASL mechanisms available for TCP are no longer considered cryptographically secure. However, it does at least provide some authentication for the libvirt API. For a more secure encrypted channel, use libvirt TLS.
SASL is enabled according to the libvirt_enable_sasl
flag, which defaults
to true
.
The username is configured via libvirt_sasl_authname
, and defaults to
kolla
. The password is configured via libvirt_sasl_password
, and is
generated with other passwords using and stored in passwords.yml
.
The list of enabled authentication mechanisms is configured via
libvirt_sasl_mech_list
, and defaults to ["SCRAM-SHA-256"]
if libvirt
TLS is enabled, or ["DIGEST-MD5"]
otherwise.
Libvirt TLS¶
The default configuration of Kolla Ansible is to run libvirt over TCP, with SASL authentication. As long as one takes steps to protect who can access the network this works well. However, in a less trusted environment one may want to use encryption when accessing the libvirt API. To do this we can enable TLS for libvirt and make nova use it. Mutual TLS is configured, providing authentication of clients via certificates. SASL authentication provides a further level of security.
Using libvirt TLS¶
Libvirt TLS can be enabled in Kolla Ansible by setting the following option in
/etc/kolla/globals.yml
:
libvirt_tls: "yes"
Creation of the TLS certificates is currently out-of-scope for Kolla Ansible. You will need to either use an existing Internal CA or you will need to generate your own offline CA. For the TLS communication to work correctly you will have to supply Kolla Ansible the following pieces of information:
cacert.pem
This is the CA’s public certificate that all of the client and server certificates are signed with. Libvirt and nova-compute will need this so they can verify that all the certificates being used were signed by the CA and should be trusted.
serverkey.pem
This is the private key for the server, and is no different than the private key of a TLS certificate. It should be carefully protected, just like the private key of a TLS certificate.
servercert.pem
This is the public certificate for the server. Libvirt will present this certificate to any connection made to the TLS port. This is no different than the public certificate part of a standard TLS certificate/key bundle.
clientkey.pem
This is the client private key, which nova-compute/libvirt will use when it is connecting to libvirt. Think of this as an SSH private key and protect it in a similar manner.
clientcert.pem
This is the client certificate that nova-compute/libvirt will present when it is connecting to libvirt. Think of this as the public side of an SSH key.
Kolla Ansible will search for these files for each compute node in the following locations and order on the host where Kolla Ansible is executed:
/etc/kolla/config/nova/nova-libvirt/<hostname>/
/etc/kolla/config/nova/nova-libvirt/
In most cases you will want to have a unique set of server and client
certificates and keys per hypervisor and with a common CA certificate. In this
case you would place each of the server/client certificate and key PEM files
under /etc/kolla/config/nova/nova-libvirt/<hostname>/
and the CA
certificate under /etc/kolla/config/nova/nova-libvirt/
.
However, it is possible to make use of wildcard server certificate and a single
client certificate that is shared by all servers. This will allow you to
generate a single client certificate and a single server certificate that is
shared across every hypervisor. In this case you would store everything under
/etc/kolla/config/nova/nova-libvirt/
.
Externally managed certificates¶
One more option for deployers who already have automation to get TLS certs onto
servers is to disable certificate management under /etc/kolla/globals.yaml
:
libvirt_tls_manage_certs: "no"
With this option disabled Kolla Ansible will simply assume that certificates and keys are already installed in their correct locations. Deployers will be responsible for making sure that the TLS certificates/keys get placed in to the correct container configuration directories on the servers so that they can get copied into the nova-compute and nova-libvirt containers. With this option disabled you will also be responsible for restarting the nova-compute and nova-libvirt containers when the certs are updated, as kolla-ansible will not be able to tell when the files have changed.