Scenario - Using PowerVM Nova plugin¶

Prerequisites¶

In order to use the PowerVM OpenStack drivers with OpenStack-Ansible (OSA), the following pre-requisites must be fulfilled:

• At least one of the repo-build servers must be ppc64le. Can mix and match repo-build servers between x86 and ppc64le.
• The compute nodes should be pre-configured for PowerVM with the NovaLink feature.
• The NovaLink Management VM needs at least one direct attach I/O card. OpenStack Ansible is currently able to deploy the PowerVM drivers when paired with the Linux Bridge or Open vSwitch agent. The traditional PowerVM Shared Ethernet Adapter networking agent is not yet supported.
• The network topology on the NovaLink must match a supported OpenStack Ansible network configuration.

PowerVM usage¶

The Compute driver for OpenStack-Ansible should automatically detect that it is of type PowerVM. If the user has specified a specific compute type, that is applicable to the whole cloud. It is advised that the you allow OSA to detect the appropriate compute node type.

The full set of configuration options for the PowerVM driver can be found in the nova-powervm usage.

Configuring storage¶

There are various storage back ends available for PowerVM such as local disk and shared storage pools. For example, to enable local disk storage backed by a logical volume group, you can set:

nova_nova_conf_overrides:
  powervm:
    disk_driver: localdisk
    volume_group_name: <<VOLUME GROUP NAME>>

To enable iSCSI as the volume attachment type, you can set the volume_adapter setting:

nova_nova_conf_overrides:
  powervm:
    volume_adapter: iscsi

The default volume attachment type for PowerVM is fibre channel.

Enabling VNC console¶

PowerVM only supports connecting to instance consoles over VNC. As OpenStack-Ansible defaults to Spice console, you must set the nova_console_type variable to enable NoVNC:

nova_console_type: novnc

Enabling configuration drive¶

By default, PowerVM uses configuration drives to provide configuration information to instances built by nova. To enable this support in OpenStack-Ansible, you can set the nova_force_config_drive variable as documented in the nova configuration instructions.

Additionally, you can enable flat network injection by using the nova_nova_conf_overrides variable:

nova_nova_conf_overrides:
  DEFAULT:
    flat_injected: True

Enabling PowerVM RMC¶

To enable PowerVM RMC, IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack mode must be enabled. To do this, you must set use_ipv6 using the nova_nova_conf_overrides variable:

nova_nova_conf_overrides:
  DEFAULT:
    use_ipv6: True