Chapter 3. Release Information

The ability of the libvirt driver to set the admin password has been added. To use this feature, run the following command: "nova root-password [server]".

The ability of the libvirt driver to set the admin password has been added. To use this feature, run the following command: "nova root-password [server]".

This update adds support for volume migrations of the Block Storage (cinder) service. These are done in the 'Volumes' panel of the OpenStack dashboard (Project-> Compute -> Volumes and in Admin-> System Panel-> Volumes). You can perform this action on the 'Volumes' row in the table.
The final patch in this series resolved the command action itself; it had previously errored out due to incorrect parameters, and parameter count issues.

OpenStack dashboard tables summarize information about a large number of entities. This update adds a table enhancement that enables this information to be displayed within the table as a slide-down "drawer" that is activated when you click on a toggle switch within a row. The drawer appears as an additional row (with configurable height) and contains additional information about the entity in the row above it (e.g. additional entity details, metrics, graphs, etc.). Multiple drawers may be opened at one time.

Instances can now be cold migrated or live migrated from hosts marked for maintenance. A new action button in the System > Hypervisors > Compute Host tab in the dashboard allows administrative users to set options for instance migration.

Cold migration moves an instance from one host to another, reboots across the move, and its destination is chosen by the scheduler. This type of migration should be used when the administrative user did not select the 'live_migrate' option in the dashboard or the migrated instance is not running.

Live migration moves an instance (with “Power state” = “active”) from one host to another, the instance doesn't appear to reboot, and its destination is optional (it can be defined by the administrative user or chosen by the scheduler). This type of migration should be used when the administrative user selected the 'live_migrate' option in the dashboard and the migrated instance is still running.

With this feature, you can now use Block Storage (cinder) to create a volume by specifying either the image ID or image name.

This update replaces the network topology with curvature based graph as the previous UI did not work well with larger number of nodes or networks.

The new network topology map can handle more nodes, looks stylish and the node layout can be re-organized.

The 'Launch Instance' workflow has been redesigned and re-implemented to be more responsive with this update.

1. To enable this update, add the following values in your /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings file:

LAUNCH_INSTANCE_LEGACY_ENABLED = False
LAUNCH_INSTANCE_NG_ENABLED = True

2. Restart 'httpd':
# systemctl restart httpd

This update adds a common API hosted by the Image Service (glance) for vendors, admins, services, and users to meaningfully define an available key/value pair, and tag metadata. The intent is to enable better metadata collaboration across artifacts, services, and projects for OpenStack users.
This definition describes the available metadata that can be used on different types of resources (images, artifacts, volumes, flavors, aggregates, among others). A definition includes the properties type, key, description, and constraints. This catalog will not store the values for specific instance properties.
For example, a definition of a virtual CPU topology property for a number of cores will include the key to use, a description, and value constraints, such as requiring it to be an integer. As a result, users (potentially through the dashboard) would be able to search this catalog to list the available properties they can add to a flavor or image. They will see the virtual CPU topology property in the list and know that it must be an integer. In the dashboard example, when the user adds the property, its key and value will be stored in the service that owns that resource (in nova for flavors, and in glance for images).

Nova's serial console API is now exposed for instances. Specifically, a serial console is available for hypervisors not supporting VNC or Spice. This update adds support for it in the dashboard.

With this update, configuration settings now exist to set timeouts, after which clusters which have failed to reach the 'Active' state will be automatically deleted.

When creating a job template intended for re-use, you can now register a variable for datasource URLs with OpenStack Data Processing (sahara). Doing so allows you to easily change input and output paths per run, rather than an actual URL (which would require revising the template, or manually revising the URL per run between jobs). 

This makes it easier to reuse job templates when data source jobs are mutable between runs, as is true for most real-world cases.

With this release, in order to provide security isolation, the '/usr/local' path has been removed from the default Block Storage rootwrap configuration. As a result, the deployments relying on Block Storage service executing commands from the '/usr/local/' as the 'root' user will need to add configuration for the commands to work.

This updates provides OpenStack notifications. Previously there were external consumers of OpenStack notifications that could not interface with director-deployed cloud because notifications were not enabled. Now director enables notifications for external consumers.

With this update, a new feature adds pagination support for the Block Storage 'snapshots-list' and 'backups-list' commands. You can now limit, marker and sort parameters to control the number of returned results, starting element and their order.

Retrieving a limited number of results instead of the entire data set can be extremely useful on the large deployments with thousands of snapshots and backups.

The Director now properly enabled notifications for external consumers.

Previously, there was no secure way to remotely access S3 backend in a private network.

With this update, a new feature allows Image service S3 driver to connect a S3 backend from a different network in a secure way through the HTTP proxy.

This enhancement enables the distribution of per-node hieradata, matching the nodes from their UUID (as reported by 'dmidecode').
This allows you to scale CephStorage across nodes equipped with a different number/type of disks.
As a result, CephStorage nodes can now be configured with non-homogeneous disk topologies. This is done by provisioning a different configuration hash for the ceph::profile::params::osds parameter.

OpenStack Bare Metal (ironic) now supports deploying nodes in UEFI mode. This is due to requests from customers with servers that only support UEFI boot.

This release includes a tech preview of Image Signing and Verification for glance images. This feature helps protect image integrity by ensuring no modifications occur after the image is uploaded by a user. This capability includes both signing of the image, and signature validation of bootable images when used.

To provide better flexibility for administrators on deployments with an assortment of storage backends, Block Storage now defines standard names for the capabilities, for example, QoS, compression, replication, bandwidth control, and thin provisioning. This means volume type specifications that will work with multiple drivers without modifications can be defined.

This enhancement adds a new scaled backend replication implementation (between backends) that leaves the bulk of the work up to the driver, while providing basic admin API methods. This is available where replication is set at the volume types level, and when the cinder driver reports its capabilities. New configuration options are available:
replication_enabled - set to True
replication_type - async, sync
replication_count - Number of replicas

The domain name for overcloud nodes defaulted to 'localdomain'. For example: 'overcloud-compute-0.localdomain'. This enhancement provides a parameter (CloudDomain) to customize the domain name. Create an environment file with the CloudDomain parameter included in the 'parameter_defaults" section. If no domain name is defined, the Heat templates default to 'localdomain'.

This enhancement enables backup of Block Storage (cinder) volumes to a Ceph object store using the same user interface as that for backing up cinder volumes to Object Storage (swift).
This was done to avoid the need for a second object store if Ceph was already being used.

This update adds neutron QoS (Quality of Service) extensions to provide better control over tenant networking qualities and limits. Overclouds are now deployed with Neutron QoS extension enabled.

The OpenDaylight OpenStack neutron driver has been split from the neutron project and moved to a new package, python-networking-odl. Operators still have the driver available for use as part of their Red Hat OpenStack Platform installations.

The Director can now deploy the Block Storage service with a Dell EqualLogic or Dell Storage Center appliance as a back end. For more information, see:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en/red-hat-openstack-platform/version-8/dell-equallogic-back-end-guide/
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en/red-hat-openstack-platform/8/dell-storage-center-back-end-guide/dell-storage-center-back-end-guide

This update introduces nested quotas. Deployers now have the ability to manage a hierarchy of quotas in Cinder, with subprojects that inherit from parent projects.

The Director now supports the OpenStack Networking 'enable_isolated_metadata' option. This option allows access to  instance metadata on VMs on external routers or on isolated networks.

With this release, panels are configurable. You can add or remove panels by using configuration snippets.

For example, to remove the "Resource panel":

* Place a file in '/usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/local/enabled'.
* Name that file '_99_disable_metering_dashboard.py'.
* Copy the following content into the file:

# The slug of the panel to be added to HORIZON_CONFIG. Required.
PANEL = 'metering'
# The slug of the dashboard the PANEL associated with. Required.
PANEL_DASHBOARD = 'admin'
# The slug of the panel group the PANEL is associated with.
PANEL_GROUP = 'admin'
REMOVE_PANEL = True

* Restart the Dashboard httpd service:
# systemctl restart httpd

For more information, see the Pluggable Dashboard Settings section in the Configuration Reference Guide in the Red Hat OpenStack Platform Documentation Suite available at: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en/red-hat-enterprise-linux-openstack-platform/

This update adds new parameters to configure API worker process counts, which allows you to tune overcloud's memory utilization and request processing capacity. The parameters are: CeilometerWorkers, CinderWorkers, GlanceWorkers, HeatWorkers, KeystoneWorkers, NeutronWorkers, NovaWorkers, and SwiftWorkers.

Previously, a router that was neither an HA nor a DVR router could not be converted into an HA router. Instead, it was necessary to create a new router and reconnect all the resources (interfaces, networks etc.) from the old router to the new one. This update adds the ability to convert a legacy router into an HA or non-HA router in a few simple commands:

# neutron router-update ROUTER --admin-state-up=False
# neutron router-update ROUTER --ha=True/False
# neutron router-upgrade ROUTER --admin-state-up=True

Replace ROUTER with the ID or name of the router to convert.

With this update, overcloud nodes can now be registered to Satellite 5 with the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, and Satellite 5 can now provide package updates to overcloud nodes.

To register overcloud nodes with a Satellite 5 instance, pass the following options to the "openstack overcloud deploy" command:

    --rhel-reg
    --reg-method satellite
    --reg-org 1
    --reg-force
    --reg-sat-url https://<satellite-5-hostname>
    --reg-activation-key <satellite-5-activation-key>

The Director now supports new parameters that control whether to disable or enable the following OpenStack Networking services:

* dhcp_agent
* l3_agent
* ovs_agent
* metadata_agent

This enhancement allows the deployment of Neutron plug-ins that replace any of these services. To disable all of these services, use the following parameters in your environment file:

  NeutronEnableDHCPAgent: false
  NeutronEnableL3Agent: false
  NeutronEnableMetadataAgent: false
  NeutronEnableOVSAgent: false

This update allows the Dashboard (horizon) to accept an IPv6 address as a VIP address to a Load Balancing Pool. As a result, you can now use Dashboard to configure IPv6 addresses on a Load Balancing Pool.

This update adds options to configure Ceilometer to store events, which can be retrieved later through Ceilometer APIs. This is an alternative to listening to the message bus to capture events. A brief outline of the configuration is in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1318397.

With the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 release, the inbuilt implementation of Amazon EC2 API in the OpenStack Compute (nova) service is deprecated and will be removed in the future releases.

Moving forward, with the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 release, a new standalone EC2 API service will be available.

This update removes unnecessary downtime caused by updating OvS switch reconfiguration when restarting the OvS agent. Previously, dropping flows on physical bridges caused networking to drop. The same issue was experienced when the patch port between br-int and br-tun was deleted and rebuilt during startup. This enhancement resolves these issues, making it possible to restart the OvS agent without unnecessarily disrupting network traffic. This results in no downtime when restarting the OvS neutron agent if the bridge is already set up and reconfiguration was not requested.