capacity headroom

Include the URL of your launchpad blueprint:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cinder/+spec/capacity-headroom

The proposal is to provide a mechanism surfacing the visibility of the total remaining block storage capacity which is available to allocate or resize volumes. It will be an indication for deployer to have the future plan.

Problem description

Currently, there is not a clear way for admin users to know how much block storage capacity left totally in cinder can be deployed.

  • condition with several backends

  • condition with a backend supporting “over subscription” which temporary capacity not used can be utilized to deploy new volumes

  • condition with a backend which reports capacity as “infinite” or “unknown”

Use Cases

The proposal calculates the virtual free capacity for each pool and also sum for each backend. It will notify the info together with other useful capacity info which already exist to ceilometer service. The ceilometer service will utilize the notification to generate capacity samples. The admin users may have a hint about the trend of cinder capacity usage, and it will be useful for future capacity planning.

Proposed change

  • Calculates the virtual free capacity for each pool which reports capcity normally and sums the total for the backend.

    How to calculate the virtual free capacity(virtual_free):

    For thin provisioning, according to the over subscription mechanism implemented for LVM, the remaining virtual capacity for a pool can be used as terminology: virtual_free = apparent_available_virtual_capacity. It can be calculated by following formula:

    virtual_free = apparent_available_virtual_capacity = total_capacity * max_over_subscription_ratio - provisioned_capacity

    For thick provisioning, just use physical capacity.

  • Notify the pool capacity and also the total capacity for a backend to ceilometer service. The capacity notification includes total/free/allocated/provisioned/virtual_free.

    For backend which reports “unknown/infinite”, just report it as “unknown/infinite”.

New methods in HostState

  • get_capacity() - call get_pools() - calculate the capacity info for pool and then sum for each backend

Alternatives

Another alternative could be:

  • create a new data table which describe capacity info into database in scheduler.

  • provide a cinder api to retrieve the capacity info from database.

Compare with the proposal, database write operations in scheduler may cost more.

Data model impact

None.

REST API impact

None.

Security impact

None.

Notifications impact

The method update_service_capabilities() in host_manager will call get_capacity() and send notifications to ceilometer service. Then ceilometer service can produce capacity samples.

Other end user impact

N/A.

Performance Impact

N/A.

Other deployer impact

N/A.

Developer impact

  • It will be better if Cinder volume drivers can report provisioned_capacity if it has. This will improve the efficiency of the storage utilization. Note: This proposal will calculate virtual capacity thru provisioned_capacity. Otherwise we will calculate physical capacity instead.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

XinXiaohui

Other contributors:

Work Items

  • Calculate the capacity:

    • Calculates the total virtual_free capacity for a pool if thin provisioning is supported.

      virtual_free = apparent_available_virtual_capacity = total_capacity * max_over_subscription_ratio - provisioned_capacity

      Otherwise, just use the physical capacity.

  • notify capacity (total/free/allocated/provisioned/virtual_free) for each pool and also notify total capacity for the backend to ceilometer service, if the backend reports “unknown/infinite”, just report it as it is.

Dependencies

  • The proposal depends on the over subscription mechanism of backend drivers.

Testing

  • Unit tests will be added.

Documentation Impact

None.

References

https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-cinder-over-subscription https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-cinder-capacity-headroom