[Users] GSoC 14 Idea Discussion - virt-sparsify integration

[Utkarsh Singh]

Hello,

I am Utkarsh, a 4th year undergrad from IIT Delhi and a GSoC-14
aspirant. I have been lately involved in an ongoing project Baadal
Cloud Computing Platform in my institute, which has got me interested
in oVirt for a potential GSoC project.

I was going through the virt-sparsify integration project idea. I have
gone through the architecture documentation on the oVirt website. As
far as I understand, the virt-sparsify integration needs to be done on
the VDSM daemon, and it's control is either going to be completely
independent of ovirt-engine (for example running it once every 24
hours), or it's something that is centrally controlled by the
ovirt-engine through XML/RPC calls. The details are not specified in
the project ideas page. I would like to ask -

1. What would be the proposed ideal implementation? (Central-Control
or Independent-Control)
2. Is virt-sparsify usage going to be automated or
administrator-triggered, or a combination of both?


There are some aspects of the idea, which I would like to discuss
before I start working on a proposal.

It's not necessary that an automated usage of virt-sparsify is limited
to any simple idea. Architecture documentation states that
ovirt-engine has features like Monitoring that would allow
administrators (and possibly users) to be aware of vm-guest
performance as well as vm-host performance. I am not very sure about
how this data is collected, Is it done through MoM, or Is this
directly done by VDSM, or is someone else doing this (for hosts). It
would be great if someone can explain that to me. This information
about vm-guest usage and vm-host health can help in determining how
virt-sparsify is to be used.

I am also not very clear about the Shared Storage component in the
architecture. Does oVirt make any assumptions about the Shared
Storage. For example, the performance difference between running
virt-sparsify on NFS as compared to running it (if possible) directly
on storage hardware. If the Storage solution is necessarily a NAS
instance, then virt-sparsify on NFS mount is the only option.



Right now, I am in the process of setting up oVirt on my system, and
getting more familiar with the architecture. Regarding my experience.
I am acquainted with both Java and Python. I have little experience
with JBoss, but I have worked on some other Web Application Servers
like web2py and Play Framework. My involvement in Baadal Platform has
got me acquainted with libvirt/QEMU, the details of which I have
mentioned below (if anyone is interested).

Please advise me about the things that I am missing about this
project. If there are some implementation details that I need to know,
kindly help me with that too.



Looking forward. Thanks.
=====================
Utkarsh
IIT Delhi

Ongoing project details -

Article (Old)
  http://www.cc.iitd.ernet.in/CSC/index.php?view=article&id=123:baadal-the-iitd-computing-cloud

Github
  https://github.com/apoorvemohan/newbaadal

My contribution - Deployment Scripting and Sandbox Environment Setup for Testing
  https://github.com/apoorvemohan/newbaadal/tree/master/baadaltesting/sandbox