Trying out oVirt's Probabilistic Optimizer

Next week in Los Angeles, I'll be giving a talk at the SCALE 13x conference on oVirt's new OptaPlanner-powered scheduling adviser.

Martin Sivák wrote a great post about the feature a couple of months ago, but didn't cover its installation process, which still has a few rough edges.

Read on to learn how to install the optimizer, and start applying fancy probabilistic fu to your oVirt VM launches and migrations.

I started off with a minimal install of CentOS 6, running in a VM hosted by my oVirt installation. To this, I added the oVirt software repository, followed by the ovirt-optimizer package:

yum install -y http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-3.5/rpm/el6/noarch/ovirt-release35-002-1.noarch.rpm  yum install -y ovirt-optimizer-jboss7.noarch

The optimizer communicates with the oVirt engine through port 8080, so we need to allow access on this port:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT  /etc/init.d/iptables save  service iptables reload

I found that after the optimizer was running for a while, I hit the java.lang.OutOfMemoryError error mentioned on the oVirt wiki, so, following the wiki's advice, I edited /usr/share/ovirt-engine-jboss-as/bin/standalone.conf to match the example provided:

JAVA_OPTS="-Xms2048m -Xmx8192m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"

Now, edit /etc/ovirt-optimizer/ovirt-optimizer.properties and edit the server, username, and password values to match those for your oVirt engine, and then start up the optimizer:

vi  /etc/ovirt-optimizer/ovirt-optimizer.properties  /usr/share/ovirt-engine-jboss-as/bin/standalone.sh -b 0.0.0.0

Once the optimizer is up and running, head over to your oVirt engine to install the engine half of the optimizer:

yum install -y ovirt-optimizer-ui

Next, edit the file /etc/ovirt-engine/ui-plugins/ovirt-optimizer-config.json to provide the http address of your optimizer service, which will look something like http://$YOUR_IP_ADDRESS:8080/ovirt-optimizer/result/.

Finally, restart the oVirt engine service:

service ovirt-engine restart

As noted in the oVirt wiki, I had to visit about:config in my Firefox browser, and set security.mixed_content.block_active_content to false for the optimizer's results to show up in my engine's web console.

Once I did, I could visit the "Optimzer Result" sub-tab within the "Clusters" tab in the oVirt web admin console to view the suggested optimizations for my environment.

Finally, if you're itching to try all this out in a more buzzword-compliant fashion, you're in luck! Roy Golan just put together a dockerized-method of running the optimizer. I haven't tested it out yet for myself, but you can follow up on it (and let me know how it goes) at Roy's github repo here.

That's it for now -- I hope to see you in Los Angeles at SCALE next week!