VMware Ephemeral Disk Support

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/improve-vmware-disk-usage

The blueprint adds support for support ephemeral disks to the VMware driver.

Problem description

The VMware driver does not support ephemeral disks.

Use Cases

Driver parity. All virt driver should implement the same set of basic features (including ephemeral disks). So that when a user uses Nova they don’t have to worry about which virt driver they are using if they are using basic features.

Project Priority

None

Proposed change

The change will add ephemeral disk support to the VMware driver. The commit acec2579b796d101f732916bfab557a66cebe512 added in a method create_virtual_disk. This method will be used to create the ephemeral disk for the instance.

The method will create an ephemeral disk for the instance on the datastore. This will be done according to the size defined in the instance flavor.

Alternatives

  • Do not implement the feature.

Data model impact

None.

REST API impact

None.

Security impact

None.

Notifications impact

None.

Other end user impact

  • Users will be able to use ephemeral disks for the vCenter driver.

Performance Impact

A modest increase in network traffic will slow down spawn operations as we create the ephemeral disk, size it, and place it for mounting in the vSphere virtual machine.

Other deployer impact

None.

Developer impact

None.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

garyk heut2008

Work Items

Dependencies

blueprint vmware-spawn-refactor

Testing

  • Minesweeper tests involving ephemeral disks will be turned on or written

Documentation Impact

After this blueprint the vmware driver will support ephemeral disks. This will need some additional documentation and changes to supported feature lists.

References

None