Per-instance serial number

Add support for providing unique per-instance serial numbers to servers.

Problem description

A libvirt guest’s serial number in the machine BIOS comes from the [libvirt]/sysinfo_serial configuration option [1], which defaults to reading it from the compute host’s /etc/machine-id file or if that does not exist, reading it from the libvirt host capabilities. Either way, all guests on the same host have the same serial number in the guest BIOS.

This can be problematic for guests running licensed software that charges per installation based on the serial number because if the guest is migrated, it will incur new charges even though it is only running a single instance of the software.

If the guest has a specific serial unique to itself, then the license essentially travels with the guest.

Use Cases

As a user (or cloud provider), I do not want workloads to incur license charges simply because of those workloads being migrated during normal operation of the cloud.

Proposed change

To allow users to control this behavior (if the cloud provides it), a new flavor extra spec hw:unique_serial and corresponding image property hw_unique_serial will be introduced which when either is set to True will result in the guest serial number being set to the instance UUID.

For operators that just want per-instance serial numbers either globally or for a set of host aggregates, a new “unique” choice will be added to the existing [libvirt]/sysinfo_serial configuration which if set will result in the guest serial number being set to the instance UUID. Note that the default value for the option will not change as part of this blueprint.

The flavor/image value, if set, supersedes the host configuration.

Alternatives

We could allow users to pass through a serial number UUID when creating a server and then pass that down through to the hypervisor, but that seems somewhat excessive for this small change. It is also not clear that all hypervisor backends support specifying the serial number in the guest and we want to avoid adding API features that not all compute drivers can support. Allowing the user to specify a serial number could also potentially be abused for pirating software unless a unique constraint was put in place, but even then it would have to span an entire deployment (per-cell DB restrictions would not be good enough).

Data model impact

None besides a new FlexibleBooleanField field being added to the ImageMetaProps object.

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

None. Users can leverage the functionality by creating new servers with an enabled flavor/image, or rebuild/resize existing servers with an enabled flavor/image.

Performance Impact

None

Other deployer impact

Operators that wish to expose this functionality can do so by adding the extra spec to their flavors and/or images or setting [libvirt]/sysinfo_serial=unique in nova configuration. If they want to restrict the functionality to a set of compute hosts, that can also be done by restricting enabled flavors/images to host aggregates.

Developer impact

None, except maintainers of other compute drivers besides the libvirt driver may wish to support the feature eventually.

Upgrade impact

There is not an explicit upgrade impact except that obviously older compute code would not know about the new flavor extra spec or image property and thus if a user was requesting a server with the property, but the serial in the guest did not match the instance UUID, they could be confused about why it does not work. Again, operators can control this by deciding when to enable the feature or by restricting it to certain host aggregates.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

Zhenyu Zheng <zhengzhenyu@huawei.com> (Kevin_Zheng)

Other contributors:

Matt Riedemann <mriedem.os@gmail.com> (mriedem)

Work Items

  • Add the ImageMetaProps.hw_unique_serial field.

  • Add a new choice, “unique”, to the [libvirt]/sysinfo_serial configuration option.

  • Check for the flavor extra spec and image property in the libvirt driver where the serial number config is set.

  • Docs and tests.

Dependencies

None

Testing

Unit tests should be sufficient for this relatively small feature.

Documentation Impact

References

History

Revisions

Release Name

Description

Stein

Introduced