Overview

zVM drivers, consist of a set of drivers/plugins for different OpenStack components, enables OpenStack to communicate with z/VM hypervisor to manage z/VM system and virtual machines running on the system

Concepts

System z

System z is a family name used by IBM for all of its mainframe computers. IBM System z are the direct descendants of System/360, announced in 1964, and the System/370 from 1970s, and now includes the IBM System z9, the IBM System z10 and the newer IBM zEnterprise. System z is famous for its high availability and used in government, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and just about every other industry.

z/VM

z/VM is a hypervisor for the IBM System z platform that provides a highly flexible test and production environment. z/VM offers a base for customers who want to exploit IBM virtualization technology on one of the industry's best-of- breed server environments, the IBM System z family. With virtualization technology, customers can easily create many virtual machines consisting of virtualized processor, communications, storage, networking, and I/O resources.

The z/VM hypervisor is designed to help clients extend the business value of mainframe technology across the enterprise by integrating applications and data while providing exceptional levels of availability, security, and operational ease. z/VM virtualization technology is designed to allow the capability for clients to run hundreds to thousands of Linux servers on a single mainframe running with other System z operating systems, such as z/OS, or as a large-scale Linux-only enterprise server solution.

xCAT

xCAT is an open source scalable distributed computing management and provisioning tool that provides a unified interface for hardware control, discovery, and OS diskful/diskfree deployment. It is used by NASA, University of Toronto, IBM, Adaptive Computing, Los Alamos Laboratory and so on. This picture show the architure of xCAT.

Prerequisites

One OpenStack nova-compute service node will manage one and only one xCAT MN node.
Each of the zVM systems (reside in different LPARs or CECs ) has one nova-compute service node
zHCP must be managed by xCAT MN.
Compute Node and xCAT MN can ssh each other without password.

How to setup

nova-zvm-virt-driver

By default /etc/nova/nova.conf, these options are required by nova zvm driver:

# Use z/VM
compute_driver = zvm.ZVMDriver
network_api_class = nova.network.quantumv2.api.API
libvirt_vif_driver = nova.virt.libvirt.vif.LibvirtHybridOVSBridgeDriver
# config drive is required
force_config_drive=true
# Only tgz is valid for now
config_drive_format=tgz
# Host name or IP address of xCAT management_node
zvm_xcat_server = 192.168.1.100
# xCAT username
zvm_xcat_username = root
# Password of the xCAT user
zvm_xcat_password = xxxxxxx
# z/VM disk pool for ephemeral disks
zvm_diskpool = pool1
# z/VM host that managed by xCAT MN
zvm_host = system360
# Default zfcp scsi disk pool
zvm_scsi_pool = smpool
# User profile for creating a z/VM userid
zvm_user_profile = myprofile
# The xCAT MM node name
zvm_xcat_master = xcatmaster

Restart your nova services after the configuration files changed.

ZVMDriver

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