Rally/ServerProviders

= Server providers: Introduction =

Server providers in Rally are typically used by deploy engines to manage virtual machines necessary for OpenStack deployment and its following benchmarking. The key feature of server providers is that they provide a unified interface for interacting with different virtualization technologies (LXS, Virsh etc.) and cloud suppliers (like Amazon).

Every server provider should implement the following basic interface:
 * constructor, which should take the deployment entity the provider should bind to and a config dictionary as its parameters;
 * create_servers(image_uuid, type_id, amount), which should create the requested number of virtual machines of the given type using a specific image. The method should also return the list of created servers wrapped in special Server entities.
 * destroy_servers, which should destroy all virtual machines previously created by the same server provider.

Below you will find a short but informative description of server providers implemented in Rally.

=Available Server providers=

Description
This provider does nothing, but returns endpoints from configuration. This may be useful if you have specific software/hardware configuration ready to deploy OpenStack.

Configuration Example
{       "type": "DevstackEngine", "provider": { "type": "ExistingServers", "credentials": [{"user": "root", "host": "10.2.0.8"}] }   }

Description
This provider creates virtual machines on host provided by configuration.

Configuration Examples
Clone VM from pre-built template using virsh {           "type": "VirshProvider", "connection": "user@host.net", "template_name": "stack-01-devstack-template", "template_user": "ubuntu", "template_password": "password" }

Description
This provider creates lxc containers on host provided by another provider. Container is attached to the same network as host.

Works well with ubuntu-13.10 hosts.

Configuration Example
{           "type": "LxcProvider", "containers_per_host": 1, "distribution": "ubuntu", "ipv4_start_address": "192.168.1.43", "ipv4_prefixlen": 16, "host_provider": { "type": "DummyProvider", "credentials": [{"user": "root", "host": "192.168.1.42"}] }   }

Description
Provides VMs using existing OpenStack cloud.

Configuration Example
{       "type": "OpenStackProvider", "deployment_name": "Rally sample deployment", "amount": 3, "user": "admin", "tenant": "admin", "password": "secret", "auth_url": "http://example.net:5000/v2.0", "flavor_id": 2, "image": { "checksum": "75846dd06e9fcfd2b184aba7fa2b2a8d", "url": "http://example.com/disk1.img", "name": "Ubuntu Precise(added by rally)", "format": "qcow2", "userdata": "#cloud-config\r\n disable_root: false\r\n manage_etc_hosts: true\r\n" }   }