Reservations

Unlike virtual resources on a regular on-demand cloud, physical resources on Chameleon must be reserved before using them for an experiment. Once a reservation has been accepted, users are guaranteed that resources will be available at the time they chose (except in extraordinary circumstances such as hardware or platform failures), which helps to plan large scale experiments.

Chameleon resources are reserved via Blazar which provides Reservation as a Service for OpenStack.

Three types of resources can be reserved: physical bare metal hosts, network segments (VLANs), and floating IPs.

Provisioning and Managing Resources Using the GUI

To make reservations of the resources, first log into the Horizon web interface - either CHI@TACC or CHI@UC. Then, choose a project and configure your local timezone. For details on how to choose a project and update personalized settings, please see Graphical User Interface (GUI).

In the navigation sidebar, go to the Reservations section and click Leases.

The Leases page in the GUI

The Leases page in the GUI

The Lease Calendars

To discover when resources are available, You can access the lease calendars by clicking on the Host Calendar button for physical hosts and clicking on the Network Calendar button for VLANs. This will display a Gantt chart of the reservations which allows you to find when resources are available. The Y axis represents the different physical nodes in the system and the X axis represents time.

The Host Calendar

The Host Calendar

The Network Calendar

The Network Calendar

Tip

The nodes and VLANs are identified by their UUIDs. The colors are used to indicate different reservations, i.e. the resources that belong to the same reservation are colored the same. Hovering over the chart provides the details about the reservation. To change the display time frame, click on 1d, 1w, and 1m buttons or fill in the start and end times.

Creating a Lease to Reserve Resources

Once you have chosen a time period when you want to reserve resources, go back to the Leases screen and click on the Create Lease button. It should bring up the window displayed below:

The Create Lease dialog

The Create Lease dialog

  1. Pick a name for the lease. The name needs to be unique across your project.

  2. Pick a start time and lease duration in days. If you would like to start your lease as soon as possible, you may leave the start time blank and Chameleon will attempt to reserve your nodes to begin immediately with a default Lease duration of 1 day.

    Note

    If you have not selected a timezone earlier, the default timezone is UTC. Therefore, the date must be entered in UTC!

    Tip

    You can get the UTC time by running date -u in your terminal.

  3. To reserve a bare metal node, navigate to the “Hosts” tab.

    The Create Lease dialog Host reservation tab

    The Create Lease dialog Host reservation tab

    1. Check “Reserve Hosts”.

    2. Choose the minimum and maximum number of hosts.

    3. Choose a node type in the drop down menu below the node_type and = drop down lists.

      Note

      You may only request one type of node in each individual lease. If you wish to request multiple node types, you must create separate Leases for each node type.

  4. To reserve a vlan segment, navigate to the “Networks” tab.

    The Create Lease dialog Network reservation tab

    The Create Lease dialog Network reservation tab

    1. Check “Reserve Network”

    2. Enter the network name and description

      Note

      When a VLAN segment reservation ends, all Neutron resources attached to the network will be automatically deleted. Bare metal instances using the network will lose network connectivity.

      Tip

      Network name is required when reserving VLAN segment.

  5. To reserve floating IPs, navigate to the “Networks” tab.

    1. Check “Reserve Floating IPs”.
    2. Choose the number of floating IPs.

  6. Click on the Create button.

Once created, the lease details will be displayed. At the bottom of the page are the details about the reservation. Initially the reservation is in the Pending status, and stays in this state until it reaches the start time.

Tip

If you want Blazar to launch an instances or complex appliance as soon as the lease starts, read the Advanced Reservation Orchestration section our Complex appliances documentation.

Lease details page

Lease details page

Once the start time of the lease is reached, the lease will be started and its reservation will change to Active; you may need to refresh the page to see the updates.

Tip

The lease is identified by a UUID. You may find it useful when using the CLI or submitting tickets on our Help Desk.

Attention

To ensure fairness to all users, resource reservations (leases) are limited to a duration of 7 days. However, an active lease within 48 hours of its end time can be prolonged by up to 7 days from the moment of request if resources are available.

Chameleon will send an email reminder to you 48 hours before your lease ends. If your lease duration is less than 48 hours, Chameleon will send you an email right after your lease is created. You can disable the email notification by using the command line.

Extending a Lease

To prolong a lease, click on the Update Lease button in Actions column.

The Update Lease Parameters dialog

The Update Lease Parameters dialog

Fill out the form by specifying the amount of additional time to add to the lease. Then, click on the Update button to finish your request.

Tip

If there is an advance reservation blocking your lease prolongation that could potentially be moved, you can interact through the users mailing list to coordinate with others users. Additionally, if you know from the start that your lease will require longer than a week and can justify it, you can submit a ticket on our Help Desk to request a one-time exception of creating a longer lease.

Changing the Number of Nodes of a Lease

It is now possible to change the number of nodes reserved in a lease. For advance reservations that haven’t yet started, the node count can be increased or decreased. For reservations already started, only new nodes can be added.

To change the number of nodes of a lease, click on the Update Lease button in Actions column.

The Update Lease Parameters dialog, changing the number of reserved nodes

The Update Lease Parameters dialog, changing the number of reserved nodes

Navigate to the “Hosts” tab, and fill out the form by specifying the new minimum and maximum numbers of hosts. Then, click on the Update button to finish your request.

Changing the Number of Floating IPs in a Lease

It is possible to change the number of floating IPs in a lease, whether the lease is pending or active. In some situations, you cannot renew a lease due to another user reserving the same floating IP in your lease. In this case, you can set your lease to have 0 floating IPs, and create a second lease just for reserving floating IPs.

To change the number of floating IPs, click on the Update Lease button in Actions column.

The Update Lease Parameters dialog, changing the number of reserved IPs

The Update Lease Parameters dialog, changing the number of reserved IPs

Navigate to the “Floating IPs” tab, and fill out the form by specifying the amount of floating IPs. Then, click on the Update button to finish your request.

Reserving a Node by UUID

You may reserve a specific node by providing its UUID. To learn more about how to find a node with a specific type, please see Resource discovery. In the Create Lease dialog, select uid in the Resource Type dropdown. Then, choose the UUID of the node you would like to reserve.

Selecting a node by UUID

Selecting a node by UUID

Provisioning and Managing Resources Using the CLI

The sections above present the most user friendly mode of usage, with most actions performed via the web interface. However, Chameleon can be accessed via the OpenStack command line tools which provides more capabilities. This section presents some advanced usage using the command line tools.

Tip

Reading Command Line Interface (CLI) is highly recommended before continuing on the following sections.

Blazar Client Installation

To reserve specific nodes, based on their identifier or their resource specifications, you must use the Blazar command line client. To use the CLI, you must install the python-blazarclient. To install python-blazarclient, run the following command:

pip install git+https://github.com/ChameleonCloud/python-blazarclient.git@chameleoncloud/xena

Note

To reserve VLAN segments or floating IPs, you must use a Chameleon fork of the Blazar client, as above.

Before using Blazar Client, You must configure the environment variables for your project via source the OpenStack RC Script or use the CLI switches every time you run the commands. Type blazar in your terminal session to enter the Interactive Mode. You may also use blazar in the Shell Mode.

Creating a Lease to Reserve Physical Hosts

To create a lease, use the lease-create command. The following arguments are required:

  • --reservation with the min, max, resource_type, and resource_properties attributes
  • --start-date in "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM" format
  • --end-date in "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM" format
  • A lease name

If --start-date is ommitted, then the current date and time will be used by default.

For example, the following command will create a lease with the name of my-first-lease and the node type of compute_skylake that starts on June 17th, 2022 at 4:00pm and ends on June 17th, 2022 at 6:00pm:

openstack reservation lease create \
  --reservation min=1,max=1,resource_type=physical:host,resource_properties='["=", "$node_type", "compute_skylake"]' \
  --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" \
  --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" \
  my-first-lease

Instead of specifying the node type, you may also reserve a specific node by providing it’s UUID. For example, to reserve the node with UUID of c9f98cc9-25e9-424e-8a89-002989054ec2, you may run the command similar to the following:

openstack reservation lease create \
  --reservation min=1,max=1,resource_type=physical:host,resource_properties='["=", "$uid", "c9f98cc9-25e9-424e-8a89-002989054ec2"]' \
  --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" \
  --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" \
  my-custom-lease

To create a lease with multiple resource properties, you must combine them like ["and", [property1], [property2], [...] ]. For example, to reserve a node with $architecture.smt_size of 48 and node_type of compute_haswell:

openstack reservation lease create \
  --reservation min=1,max=1,resource_type=physical:host,resource_properties='["and", ["=", "$architecture.smt_size", "48"], ["=", "$node_type", "compute_haswell"]]' \
  --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" \
  --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" \
  my-custom-lease

Attention

To specify a before_end action, simply add before_end=<action_type> to reservation parameter. For example:

openstack reservation lease create \
  --reservation min=1,max=1,resource_type=physical:host,resource_properties='["=", "$uid", "c9f98cc9-25e9-424e-8a89-002989054ec2"]',before_end=email \
  --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" \
  --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" \
  my-custom-lease

Currently supported before_end action types include

Action Type Description
email Send an email notification.
default Default action used when no action is specified; Currently set to email.
'' Do nothing.

The default before_end action is set to email. To disable the email notification, set before_end=''.

Actually, you may use any resource property that is in the resource registry to reserve the nodes. To see the list of properties of nodes, first get the full list of nodes with the command:

openstack reservation host list

The output should look like:

+------+--------------------------------------+-------+-----------+----------+
| id   | hypervisor_hostname                  | vcpus | memory_mb | local_gb |
+------+--------------------------------------+-------+-----------+----------+
| 151  | 00401ba8-4fb0-4f1e-a7dc-e93065ebdd15 |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 233  | 004c89fa-ff13-4563-9012-f2d62c1a7aff |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 330  | 01029fb8-0a0b-4949-92b0-a756fb8588e5 |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 146  | 036b16e3-9fa6-442c-8e6d-cfe12ed5c8a3 |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 992  | 05dd5e25-440f-4492-b3b8-9d39af83b8bc |     8 |      3200 |      100 |
| 219  | 066d92f5-7cb9-49ea-8f05-842566672ebf |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 3216 | 06b164d5-3514-4ebe-8928-0bd2f9508b80 |     0 |         0 |        0 |
| 156  | 07030786-d6e8-46b4-b0f2-79b0b303b518 |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 212  | 07051549-c404-44af-8e73-8beb5891864a |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 175  | 07fd65f0-b814-429b-a2fb-3a4afa52de41 |    24 |    128000 |      200 |
| 255  | 081d2cb1-b6b5-4014-b226-7a42d8588307 |    24 |    128000 |      200 |

To get resource properties of a host, run host-show command with the id listed in the first column. For example, to get the resource properties of the host 151, run:

openstack reservation host show 151

The output should look like:

+----------------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| Field                            | Value                                       |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| architecture.platform_type       | x86_64                                      |
| architecture.smp_size            | 2                                           |
| architecture.smt_size            | 48                                          |
| bios.release_date                | 03/09/2022                                  |
| bios.vendor                      | Dell Inc.                                   |
| bios.version                     | 1.2                                         |
| chassis.manufacturer             | Dell Inc.                                   |
| chassis.name                     | PowerEdge R630                              |
| chassis.serial                   | 4VJGD42                                     |
| cpu_info                         | baremetal cpu                               |
| created_at                       | 2022-06-26 20:50:58                         |
| gpu.gpu                          | False                                       |
| hypervisor_hostname              | 00401ba8-4fb0-4f1e-a7dc-e93065ebdd15        |
| hypervisor_type                  | ironic                                      |
| hypervisor_version               | 1                                           |
| id                               | 151                                         |
| uid                              | c9f98cc9-25e9-424e-8a89-002989054ec2        |
| updated_at                       |                                             |
| vcpus                            | 48                                          |
| version                          | 78dbf26565cf24050718674dcf322331fab8ead5    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------------------+

Any of the property listed in the field column may be used to reserve the nodes. For example, you can use resource_properties='["=", "$architecture.smp_size", "2"]' to reserve a node with two physical processors.

Note

Remember to use $ in front of the property.

Extending a Lease

To extend your lease, use lease-update command, and provide time duration via --prolong-for switch. The format of the duration is a number followed by a letter specifying the time unit. w is for weeks, d is for days and h is for hours. For example, if you would like to extend the my-first-lease by one day, run the following command:

openstack reservation lease update --prolong-for "1d" my-first-lease

Chameleon Node Types

The following node types are reservable on Chameleon.

Node Type resource_properties='["=", "$node_type", "<Chameleon node type name>"]'
Skylake compute nodes compute_skylake
Storage nodes storage
Haswell Infiniband nodes compute_haswell_ib
Storage Hierarchy nodes storage_hierarchy
NVIDIA K80 nodes gpu_k80
NVIDIA M40 nodes gpu_m40
NVIDIA P100 nodes gpu_p100
NVIDIA P100 NVLink nodes gpu_p100_nvlink
NVIDIA RTX 6000 nodes gpu_rtx_6000
FPGA nodes fpga
Low power Xeon nodes lowpower_xeon
Atom nodes atom
ARM64 nodes arm64

Creating a Lease to Reserve a VLAN Segment

To create a lease, use the lease-create command. The following arguments are required:

  • --reservation with the resource_type and network_name attributes
  • --start-date in "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM" format
  • --end-date in "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM" format
  • A lease name

Optional attributes include network_description and resource_properties which can both be added to the --reservation argument.

For example, the following command will create a lease with the name of my-first-vlan-lease and the network name my-network that starts on June 17th, 2022 at 4:00pm and ends on June 17th, 2022 at 6:00pm:

openstack reservation lease create --reservation resource_type=network,network_name="my-network" --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" my-first-vlan-lease

Adding the network_description attribute provides its value as the description field when creating the Neutron network, allowing to leverage Chameleon Software Defined Networking features.

openstack reservation lease create --reservation resource_type=network,network_name="my-network",network_description="OFController=${OF_CONTROLLER_IP}:${OF_CONTROLLER_PORT}" --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" my-first-vlan-lease

Adding the resource_properties attribute allows you to reserve a specific network segment or physical network type. There are currently only two physical network types physnet1 and exogeni. You can read more about both types in Networking. The following two examples show how to reserve a network by segment_id or physical_network.

openstack reservation lease create --reservation resource_type=network,network_name=my-network,resource_properties='["==","$segment_id","3501"]' --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" my-first-vlan-lease

openstack reservation lease create --reservation resource_type=network,network_name=my-network,resource_properties='["==","$physical_network","physnet1"]' --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" my-first-vlan-lease

While separate leases can be created to reserve nodes and VLAN segments, it is also possible to combine multiple reservations within a single lease. The following example creates a lease reserving one Skylake compute node and one VLAN segment:

openstack reservation lease create --reservation min=1,max=1,resource_type=physical:host,resource_properties='["=", "$node_type", "compute_skylake"]' --reservation resource_type=network,network_name="my-network" --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" my-combined-lease

Creating a Lease to Reserve Floating IPs

To create a lease, use the lease-create command. The following arguments are required:

  • --reservation with the resource_type and network_id attributes
  • --start-date in "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM" format
  • --end-date in "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM" format
  • A lease name

Multiple floating IPs can be reserved using the amount attribute. If ommitted, only one floating IP is reserved.

For example, the following command will create a lease with the name of my-first-fip-lease that starts on June 17th, 2022 at 4:00pm and ends on June 17th, 2022 at 6:00pm and reserves three floating IPs:

pip install python-openstackclient
PUBLIC_NETWORK_ID=$(openstack network show public -c id -f value)
openstack reservation lease create --reservation resource_type=virtual:floatingip,network_id=${PUBLIC_NETWORK_ID},amount=3 --start-date "2022-06-17 16:00" --end-date "2022-06-17 18:00" my-first-fip-lease

Reallocating a Node in Your Lease

After creating your lease, you can view its details in the Horizon web interface. On this page, at the bottom, you can see a list of nodes in your lease. If you wish to reallocate one of the nodes in your lease, you can press the red “Re-Allocate Host” button next to it.

The re-allocate buttons on the lease detail page

The nodes on the lease detail page.

You can also do the same on the command-line. Run the command that follows, entering your lease ID and the node ID where appropriate.

openstack reservation host reallocate --lease-id LEASE_ID NODE_ID

If you re-allocate a host because it is malfunctioning, please make sure to report it to the Help Desk so that we can fix it.