We are excited to announce the availability of new Icehouse VOVA!
We have updated the VOVA download link in the VOVA manual with the latest Icehouse code of OpenStack and all our drivers. Following are some of the new VMware features in Icehouse.
- Glance support for vSphere datastores: Glance can be configured to use vSphere datastores for storing images. First advantage of this is that there is no need for another storage solution to store Glance images. With vSphere datastores, the same NAS/SAN can be used for storing images as is used for Nova/Cinder files. Second advantage is that Nova vCenter driver can use optimizations to reduce the instance and snapshot creation time. This is achieved by avoiding the network transfer of image or snapshot bits and leveraging faster datastore-to-datastore copies. Please check out the upstream docs for details on setting up the vCenter datastores for Glance
- OVA support: Nova vCenter driver can create instance using ova images.
- ISO images: vCenter driver can now consume ISO images
- VSAN support: Both Nova and Cinder can use VSAN to store the VM files and volumes. VSAN requires stream optimized images e.g images in ova format.
- Image cache purging: The image copies that are not being used currently will be automatically purged based on the duration that they have been unused.
- Policy Based Management of Nova and Cinder storage: In vCenter, admins can create storage policies and associate datastores with them. For eg: fast/expensive storage can be tagged as 'premium' and cheaper storage could be tagged as 'standard'. These policies can then be used to guide the placement of VMs and volumes. For Nova VMs, add a policy attribute to the image flavor and the vCenter driver will use this policy info to determine the right datastore for storing the VM files. Similarly for Cinder we use the notion of 'volume types' to guide the placement of block volumes. Please check out the upstream doc for more details.
We encourage you to download the new VOVA and look forward to your feedback. Happy stacking!
Regards,
VMware OpenStack Team