Tuesday, 2026-03-24

gokhanHi everyone, I’m working on designing a large-scale architecture and could use some advice from the community. So far, I’ve been running about 50-100 hypervisors with 3 controllers without any issues, but I'm now planning to scale up to 1,000 nodes and I'm wondering what the best path forward is. At what point does Cells v2 become a 'must-have' rather than just an option? For those of you running massive setups, how many compute nodes do 06:59
gokhanyou typically manage per cell to keep things stable and limit the blast radius? I'd love to hear your experiences on whether a single-cell setup can actually handle 1,000 nodes with the right tuning, or if I should definitely start splitting things up now. Thanks a lot for any tips!06:59
gibigokhan: I think 1000 node in a single cell is a huge strech. Might work if you have a fairly static workload. I think our non official recommendation is to start considering cells around 200 nodes08:13
gibigokhan: if you search around the net you will find reports from large scale openstack deployers, like CERN, about their size and tuning. For example https://superuser.openinfra.org/articles/large-scale-openstack-operators-tricks-and-tools-openinfra-live-recap/ or https://techblog.web.cern.ch/techblog/08:17
gokhanthanks gibi for your insights :)08:53
gibigokhan: also take the approach to scale gradually if you can, and measure the scale. If you see a bottleneck in certain operations then we can help suggesting tunings for it08:55
gibiunfortunately there is no one single good answer for scale08:56
gokhanthanks gibi, we will start with about 100 nodes per cell . 09:07
opendevreviewMerged openstack/nova master: docs: mention q35 machine type for UEFI guests  https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/98141309:19
*** sambork_ is now known as sambork09:26
-opendevstatus- NOTICE: Recent POST_FAILURE job results with no logs were due to upload errors in one of our providers, which has been temporarily disabled now so rechecking those should be safe15:04
yessou-samiHi everyone, i was wondering if has anyone done an analysis about how much is safe enabling hw_qemu_guest_agent on openstack to enable guest agents to be in contact with the hypervisor?15:38
sean-k-mooneythat now quite how that works15:59
sean-k-mooneyhw_qemu_guest_agent when you enable hw_qemu_guest_agent it provide a channel form the hsot to allow the host to interact with an agent in teh guest15:59
sean-k-mooneybut it does not provide a way for the guest to interact with the hypervior15:59
sean-k-mooneyat least not by default15:59
sean-k-mooneyhw_qemu_guest_agent is generally consider safe unless you are plannign to develop a host agent that will interact with it or do some other custom integration16:00
gibialso settinng hw_qemu_guest_agent alone is not enough, the image needs to have the agent installed. Nova neiter checks for it nor installs it into the guest.16:59
bauzasfun that I answered the same question earlier today somewhere else17:00
bauzasif people want to ensure that GA is installed if users set the GA property, then they have to talk to Glance, not us17:00
cardoehello all. Still hoping to see https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova-specs/+/471815 get done. The code is written for a few cycles. As are the tests. The code is deployed for a number of cloud operators as well.17:06
sean-k-mooneygibi: yes and for the actual usful featre i.e. quiesing the guest disk on snapshot i think you need to set a second extra spec too17:29
sean-k-mooneyos_require_quiesce17:30
sean-k-mooneyalthough in thory an operator can use teh qemu geust agent for other thing17:30
sean-k-mooneyi belive rackspace used to use it to configure soem thign by defualt in there cloud like dhcp/dns ectra17:31
sean-k-mooneybauzas: well hw_qemu_guest_agent isnt strictly saying it is installed in teh current image. its saying i want to use the guest agent. for reason i might chosse to install it after the fact with ansible or cloud init in the image18:00
sean-k-mooney*in the vm rather then in the image18:00
bauzasthen there is no way for Nova to introspect that VM 18:00
sean-k-mooneybut ya all that image proprly does is ensure the qemu channel for the guest agent is providsioned in qemu18:00
sean-k-mooneybauzas: correct that is out of scope fo nova18:01
bauzasat least I don't want to have Nova introspecting the guest :)18:01
sean-k-mooneynor do i18:01
sean-k-mooneyit woudl be incorrect for nova to do so in this case18:01
bauzasmy proposal was to make it enforced by Glance, provided the operator was wanting it18:01
bauzasbut that's a Glance discussion18:01
sean-k-mooneyoh no i dont think galnce shoudl enforce it either18:01
sean-k-mooneythat to me woudl be a breakign chagne requrieign at least a config option18:02
sean-k-mooneyas i said this image peroperlty is for requesting the guest agent channel to be provisioned18:02
sean-k-mooneyits not declearing that the image has it installed18:02
sean-k-mooneythose are two very diffent things18:02
bauzassurely, I'm just saying that the service that has the responsibility for introspecting the image is Glance as of today18:02
sean-k-mooneysure but im saying that the image proprty does not state that its installed18:03
sean-k-mooneythat not what its for18:03
bauzassean-k-mooney: yup yup, but AFAICU, the request was to have GA be default18:03
bauzassince public clouds operators don't trust their users 18:03
sean-k-mooneyoh thats an entirly diffent converation18:03
sean-k-mooneywe coudl do that18:03
sean-k-mooneyor make it configurable via the flavor so admin can opt in18:04
sean-k-mooneybut that very diffent then introspecting the image18:04
gmaanGibi: Bauzas: Not sure if you got time to check this change (running graceful shutdown running on both mode), but it will be good to do it before any breaking change.  https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/978292 18:27
gmaangibi: ^^18:27
gibigmaan: +2, thanks18:30
gmaanthanks18:30
opendevreviewGhanshyam Maan proposed openstack/nova stable/2026.1: DNM: test grenade job  https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/98198018:36
opendevreviewGhanshyam Maan proposed openstack/nova stable/2025.2: DNM: test grenade job  https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/98198218:39
JayFUggla: I don't see OpenStack Nova with a slide in OpenInfra Live Gazpacho; is nova being repped in that at all? Y'all probably should have someone there :| 20:53
sean-k-mooneyi tought someone was going to attend but i have not really been invoved20:58
UgglaJayF, I have just answered that I will cover Nova highlights. Thanks for the reminder.22:42
JayFawesome, thanks. It didn't look like many projects had opted in so I'm glad to get more22:43

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