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Deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform at scale

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.1

Hardware requirements and recommendations for large deployments

OpenStack Documentation Team

Abstract

This guide contains several recommendations for deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform at scale. These recommendations include hardware recommendations, undercloud tuning, and overcloud configuration.

Making open source more inclusive

Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. We are beginning with these four terms: master, slave, blacklist, and whitelist. Because of the enormity of this endeavor, these changes will be implemented gradually over several upcoming releases. For more details, see our CTO Chris Wright’s message.

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Chapter 1. Recommendations for large deployments

Use the following undercloud and overcloud recommendations, specifications, and configuration for deploying a large Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) environment. RHOSP 17.1 deployments that include more than 100 overcloud nodes are considered large environments. Red Hat has tested and validated optimum performance on a large scale environment of 750 overcloud nodes using RHOSP 17.1 without using minion.

For DCN-based deployments, the number of nodes from the central and edge sites can be very high. For recommendations about DCN deployments, contact Red Hat Global Support Services.

Chapter 3. Red Hat OpenStack deployment best practices

Review the following best practices when you plan and prepare to deploy OpenStack. You can apply one or more of these practices in your environment.

3.1. Red Hat OpenStack deployment preparation

Before you deploy Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP), review the following list of deployment preparation tasks. You can apply one or more of the deployment preparation tasks in your environment:

Set a subnet range for introspection to accommodate the maximum overcloud nodes for which you want to perform introspection at a time
When you use director to deploy and configure RHOSP, use CIDR notations for the control plane network to accommodate all overcloud nodes that you add now or in the future.
Enable Jumbo Frames for preferred networks
When a high-use network uses jumbo frames or a higher MTU, the network can send larger datagrams or TCP payloads and reduce the CPU overhead for higher bandwidth. Enable jumbo frames only for networks that have network switch support for higher MTU. Standard networks that are known to give better performance with higher MTU are the Tenant network, Storage network and the Storage Management network. For more information, see Configuring jumbo frames in Installing and managing Red Hat OpenStack Platform with director.
Set the World Wide Name (WWN) as the root disk hint for each node to prevent nodes from using the wrong disk during deployment and booting
When nodes contain multiple disks, use the introspection data to set the WWN as the root disk hint for each node. This prevents the node from using the wrong disk during deployment and booting. For more information, see Defining the Root Disk for multi-disk Ceph clusters in the Installing and managing Red Hat OpenStack Platform with director guide.
Enable the Bare Metal service (ironic) automated cleaning on nodes that have more than one disk

Use the Bare Metal service automated cleaning to erase metadata on nodes that have more than one disk and are likely to have multiple boot loaders. Nodes might become inconsistent with the boot disk due to the presence of multiple bootloaders on disks, which leads to node deployment failure when you attempt to pull the metadata that uses the wrong URL.

To enable the Bare Metal service automated cleaning, on the undercloud node, edit the undercloud.conf file and add the following line: 

clean_nodes = true
Limit the number of nodes for Bare Metal (ironic) introspection

If you perform introspection on all nodes at the same time, failures might occur due to network constraints. Perform introspection on up to 50 nodes at a time.

Ensure that the dhcp_start and dhcp_end range in the undercloud.conf file is large enough for the number of nodes that you expect to have in the environment.

If there are insufficient available IPs, do not issue more than the size of the range. This limits the number of simultaneous introspection operations. To allow the introspection DHCP leases to expire, do not issue more IP addresses for a few minutes after the introspection completes.

3.2. Red Hat OpenStack deployment configuration

Review the following list of recommendations for your Red Hat OpenStack Platform(RHOSP) deployment configuration:

Validate the heat templates with a small scale deployment
Deploy a small environment that consists of at least three Controllers, one Compute note, and three Ceph Storage nodes. You can use this configuration to ensure that all of your heat templates are correct.
Improve instance distribution across Compute

During the creation of a large number of instances, the Compute scheduler does not know the resources of a Compute node until the resource allocation of previous instances is confirmed for the Compute node. To avoid the uneven spawning of Compute nodes, you can perform one of the following actions:

  • Set the value of the NovaSchedulerShuffleBestSameWeighedHosts parameter to true: 

    parameter_defaults:
   NovaSchedulerShuffleBestSameWeighedHosts: `True`

  • To ensure that a Compute node is not overloaded with instances, set max_instances_per_host to the maximum number of instances that any Compute node can spawn and ensure that the NumInstancesFilter parameter is enabled. When this instance count is reached by a Compute node, then the scheduler will no longer select it for further instance spawn scheduling.

    Note

    The NumInstancesFilter parameter is enabled by default. But if you modify the NovaSchedulerEnabledFilters parameter in the environment files, ensure that you enable the NumInstancesFilter parameter. 

    parameter_defaults:
  ControllerExtraConfig
    nova::scheduler::filter::max_instances_per_host: <maximum_number_of_instances>
    NovaSchedulerEnabledFilters:
    - AvailabilityZoneFilter
    - ComputeFilter
    - ComputeCapabilitiesFilter
    - ImagePropertiesFilter
    - ServerGroupAntiAffinityFilter
    - ServerGroupAffinityFilter
    - NumInstancesFilter
    • Replace <maximum_number_of_instances> with the maximum number of instances that any Compute node can spawn.
Scale configurations for the Networking service (neutron)

The settings in Table 3.1. were tested and validated to improve performance and scale stability on a large-scale openstack environment.

The server-side probe intervals control the timeout for probes sent by ovsdb-server to the clients: neutron, ovn-controller, and ovn-metadata-agent. If they do not get a reply from the client before the timeout elapses, they will disconnect from the client, forcing it to reconnect. The most likely scenario for a client to timeout is upon the initial connection to the ovsdb-server, when the client loads a copy of the database into memory. When the timeout is too low, the ovsdb-server disconnects the client while it is downloading the database, causing the client to reconnect and try again and this cycle repeats forever. Therefore, if the maximum timeout interval does not work then set the probe interval value to zero to disable the probe.

If the client-side probe intervals are disabled, they use TCP keepalive messages to monitor their connections to the ovsdb-server.

Note

Always use tripleo heat template (THT) parameters, if available, to configure the required settings. Because manually configured settings will be overwritten by config download runs, when default values are defined in either THT or Puppet. Furthermore, you can only manually configure settings for existing environments, therefore the modified settings will not be applied to any new or replaced nodes.

Table 3.1. Recommended scale configurations for the Networking service
SettingDescriptionManual configurationTHT parameter

OVS server-side inactivity probe on Compute nodes

Increase this probe interval from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. 

ovs-vsctl set Manager . inactivity_probe=30000
 

OVN Northbound server-side inactivity probe on Controller nodes

Increase this probe interval to 180000 ms or set it to 0 to disable it. 

podman exec -u root ovn_controller ovn-nbctl --no-leader-only set Connection . inactivity_probe=180000
 

OVN Southbound server-side inactivity probe on Controller nodes

Increase this probe interval to 180000 ms or set it to 0 to disable it. 

podman exec -u root ovn_controller ovn-sbctl --no-leader-only set Connection . inactivity_probe=180000
 

OVN controller remote probe interval on Compute nodes

Increase this probe interval to 180000 ms or set it to 0 to disable it. 

podman exec -u root ovn_controller ovs-vsctl --no-leader-only set Open_vSwitch . external_ids:ovn-remote-probe-interval=180000

OVNRemoteProbeInterval: 180000

Networking service client-side probe interval on Controller nodes

Increase this probe interval to 180000 ms or set it to 0 to disable it. 

crudini --set /var/lib/config-data/puppet-generated/neutron/etc/neutron/plugins/ml2/ml2_conf.ini ovn ovsdb_probe_interval 180000

OVNOvsdbProbeInterval: 180000

Networking service api_workers on Controller nodes

Increase the default number of separate API worker processes from 12 to 16 or more, based on the load on the neutron-server. 

crudini --set /var/lib/config-data/puppet-generated/neutron/etc/neutron/neutron.conf DEFAULT api_workers 16

NeutronWorkers: 16

Networking service agent_down_time on Controller nodes

Set agent_down_time to the maximum permissible number for very large clusters. 

crudini --set /var/lib/config-data/puppet-generated/neutron/etc/neutron/neutron.conf DEFAULT agent_down_time 2147483

NeutronAgentDownTime: 2147483

OVN metadata report_agent on Compute nodes

Disable the report_agent on large installations. 

crudini --set /var/lib/config-data/puppet-generated/neutron/etc/neutron/neutron_ovn_metadata_agent.ini agent report_agent false
 

OVN metadata_workers on Compute nodes

Reduce the metadata_workers to the minimum on all Compute nodes to reduce the connections to the OVN Southbound database. 

crudini --set /var/lib/config-data/puppet-generated/neutron/etc/neutron/neutron_ovn_metadata_agent.ini DEFAULT metadata_workers 1

NeutronMetadataWorkers: 1

OVN metadata rpc_workers on Compute nodes

Reduce the rpc_workers to the minimum on all Compute nodes. 

crudini --set /var/lib/config-data/puppet-generated/neutron/etc/neutron/neutron_ovn_metadata_agent.ini DEFAULT rpc_workers 0

NeutronRpcWorkers: 0

OVN metadata client-side probe interval on Compute nodes

Increase this probe interval to 180000 ms or set it to 0 to disable it. 

crudini --set /var/lib/config-data/puppet-generated/neutron/etc/neutron/neutron_ovn_metadata_agent.ini ovn ovsdb_probe_interval 180000

OVNOvsdbProbeInterval: 180000

Limit the number of nodes that are provisioned at the same time

Fifty is the typical amount of servers that can fit within an average enterprise-level rack unit, therefore, you can deploy an average of one rack of nodes at one time.

To minimize the debugging necessary to diagnose issues with the deployment, deploy a maximum of 50 nodes at one time. If you want to deploy a higher number of nodes, Red Hat has successfully tested up to 100 nodes simultaneously.

To scale Compute nodes in batches, use the openstack overcloud deploy command with the --limit option. This can result in saved time and lower resource consumption on the undercloud.

Disable unused NICs

If the overcloud has any unused NICs during the deployment, you must define the unused interfaces in the NIC configuration templates and set the interfaces to use_dhcp: false and defroute: false.

If you do not define unused interfaces, there might be routing issues and IP allocation problems during introspection and scaling operations. By default, the NICs set BOOTPROTO=dhcp, which means the unused overcloud NICs consume IP addresses that are needed for the PXE provisioning. This can reduce the pool of available IP addresses for your nodes.

Power off unused Bare Metal Provisioning (ironic) nodes
Ensure that you power off any unused Bare Metal Provisioning (ironic) nodes in maintenance mode. Bare Metal Provisioning does not track the power state of nodes in maintenance mode and incorrectly reports the power state of nodes from previous deployments left in maintenance mode in a powered on state as off. This can cause problems with ongoing deployments if the unused node has an operating system with stale configurations, for example, IP addresses from overcloud networks. When you redeploy after a failed deployment, ensure that you power off all unused nodes.

3.3. Tuning the undercloud

Review this section when you plan to scale your Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) deployment to configure your default undercloud settings.

Tune HA Services to support larger message size
A large-scale deployment requires a larger message size than the default values configured for the mariadb and rabbitmq HA services. Increase these values by using a custom environment file as well as hieradata override file before deploying the undercloud:

custom_env_files.yaml 

parameter_defaults:
    max_message_size: 536870912
    MySQLServerOptions:
        mysqld:
            max_allowed_packet: "512M"

hieradata_override.yaml 

rabbitmq_config_variables:
  max_message_size: 536870912
  cluster_partition_handling: 'ignore'
  queue_master_locator: '<<"min-masters">>'

undercloud.conf 

custom_env_files = /home/stack/custom-undercloud-params.yaml
hieradata_override = /home/stack/hieradata.yaml
Increase the open file limit to 4096
Ensure that you increase the open file limit of your undercloud to 4096, by editing the following parameters in the /etc/security/limits.conf file: 
*  soft  nofile  4096
*  hard  nofile  4096
Separate the provisioning and configuration processes
  • To create only the stack and associated RHOSP resources, you can run the deployment command with the --stack-only option.
  • Red Hat recommends separating the stack and config-download steps when deploying more than 100 nodes.

Include any environment files that are required for your overcloud: 

$ openstack overcloud deploy \
  --templates \
  -e <environment-file1.yaml> \
  -e <environment-file2.yaml> \
  ...
  --stack-only

  • After you have provisioned the stack, you can enable SSH access for the tripleo-admin user from the undercloud to the overcloud. The config-download process uses the tripleo-admin user to perform the Ansible based configuration: 

    $ openstack overcloud admin authorize

  • To disable the overcloud stack creation and to only apply the config-download workflow to the software configuration, you can run the deployment command with the --config-download-only option. Include any environment files that are required for your overcloud: 

    $ openstack overcloud deploy \
 --templates \
 -e <environment-file1.yaml> \
 -e <environment-file2.yaml> \
  ...
 --config-download-only
  • To limit the config-download playbook execution to a specific node or set of nodes, you can use the --limit option.

  • For scale-up operations, to only apply software configuration on the new nodes, you can use the --limit option with the --config-download-only option. 

    $ openstack overcloud deploy \
--templates \
-e <environment-file1.yaml> \
-e <environment-file2.yaml> \
...
--config-download-only --config-download-timeout --limit <Undercloud>,<Controller>,<Compute-1>,<Compute-2>

    If you use the --limit option always include <Controller> and <Undercloud> in the list. Tasks that use the external_deploy_steps interface, for example all Ceph configurations, are executed when <Undercloud> is included in the options list. All external_deploy_steps tasks run on the undercloud.

    For example, if you run a scale-up task to add a Compute node that requires a connection to Ceph and you do not include <Undercloud> in the list, then this task fails because the Ceph configuration and cephx key files are not provided.

    Do not use the --skip-tags external_deploy_steps option or the task fails.

    Note

    Instance migrations do not work between some computes after using --limit option for scale-up operations. This is because the original and newly added computes nodes have mutually exclusive information in their respective /etc/hosts and /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts files.

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