Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 045 - Blazar Reservation Service

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin relate the experience of converting a small VMware cluster into two small OpenStack clusters, and the adventures and friends I made along the way.

Adventures of a Small Time OpenStack Sysadmin Chapter 045 - Blazar Reservation Service

First, links to some reference docs I used:

Blazar Docs Page

https://docs.openstack.org/blazar/yoga/

No Kolla-Ansible Deployment Configuration Reference for Blazar.

Blazar CLI Client

Run this:

pip install python-blazarclient -c https://releases.openstack.org/constraints/upper/yoga

Experimenting with Blazar

I have a kind of embarrassing funny story about the early days of Blazar, I should have realized if I add my hosts to Blazar as a reservable resource, if I don't have the hosts leased I can't spawn instances on them.  Got burned on that one, LOL.  I know its literally what Blazar is supposed to do, although I have to admit the error messages that resulted were bizarre, so weird, that I thought I killed Nova accidentally via other experimenting.  The UI when trying to use a reserved resource "illegally" could use a bit of work.

I also had an interesting design confusion about Blazar.  I was pretty chill with the idea that a host reservation was for an entire Nova-Compute host, other than silliness like forgetting I had reserved all my hosts in an experiment one time, LOL.  However, I had assumed that an instance reservation was for a specific existing instance; perhaps I could somehow monopolize a specific mysql server or similar reservation task.  That is NOT the case nor the design scenario; an instance reservation is to reserve the creation of a specific instance, which creates a new UUID numbered flavor ID.  Then when your reservation is chronologically active you can create an instance using that magical new flavor ID.  That's a cool idea but not what I expected based upon the name of the reservation type.

I tested and experimented with Blazar, to include locking myself out of my own cluster temporarily, and it all seems to work very well, although I have no particular use for it at this time.  It really is good reliable cool and interesting software, but it doesn't match my use case, so after my experimenting during the Plan 2.0 era, its not getting installed in the Plan 3.0 era.

Tomorrow, Skydive.  No, not me with a parachute, I mean the cool graphical web-accessible network monitoring tool.

Stay tuned for the next chapter!