Re: [PATCH 3/6] Introduce yet another migration version in API.

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On 04/20/2011 05:28 PM, Christian Benvenuti (benve) wrote:
Daniel,
   I looked at the patch-set you sent out on the 2/9/11

    [PATCH 0/6] Introduce a new migration protocol
                         to QEMU driver
   http://www.mail-archive.com/libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx/msg33223.html

What is the status of this new migration protocol?
Is there any pending issue blocking its integration?

I would like to propose an RFC enhancement to the migration
algorithm.

Here is a quick summary of the proposal/idea.

- finer control on migration result

   - possibility of specifying what features cannot fail
     their initialization on the dst host during migration.
     Migration should not succeed if any of them fails.
     - optional: each one of those features should be able to
                 provide a deinit function to cleanup resources
                 on the dst host if migration fails.

This functionality would come useful for the (NIC) set port
profile feature VDP (802.1Qbg/1Qbh), but what I propose is
a generic config option / API that can be used by any feature.

And now the details.

----------------------------------------------
enhancement: finer control on migration result
----------------------------------------------

There are different reasons why a VM may need (or be forced) to
migrate.
You can classify the types of the migrations also based on
different semantics.
For simplicity I'll classify them into two categories, based on
how important it is for the VM to migrate as fast as possible:

(1) It IS important

    In this case, whether the VM will not be able to (temporary)
    make use of certain resources (for example the network) on the
    dst host, is not that important, because the completion of the
    migration is considered higher priority.
    A possible scenario could be a server that must migrate ASAP
    because of a disaster/emergency.

(2) It IS NOT important

    I can think of a VM whose applications/servers need a network
    connection in order to work properly. Loosing such network
    connectivity as a consequence of a migration would not be
    acceptable (or highly undesirable).

Given the case (2) above, I have a comment about the Finish
step, with regards to the port profile (VDP) codepath.

The call to

     qemuMigrationVPAssociatePortProfile

in
     qemuMigrationFinish

can fail, but its result (success or failure) does not influence
the result of the migration Finish step (it was already like this
in migration V2).

I *believe* the underlying problem is Qemu's switch-over. Once Qemu decides that the migration was successful, Qemu on the source side dies and continues running on the destination side. I don't think there are more handshakes foreseen with higher layers that this could be reversed or the switch-over delayed, but correct me if I am wrong... So now whatever we do, we'd have to associate the port profile before the actual switch-over, if we wanted to do something better than what is there now and have the opportunity to terminate the migration before the switch-over by Qemu happens in case of failure to associate profiles. The problem is to know when the switch-over happens or when the migration goes into the final phase where the source side doesn't run anymore. The would allow us to not associate the ports right at the beginning of the migration but maybe towards the time when for example in live-migration the source is not running anymore *and* also we have the result of the association before Qemu on the source dies for good. I think some additional coordination between libvirt and Qemu would be necessary so that if higher layer ops fail before the resume on the destination side happens that Qemu can still fall back to the source side. I believe what could happen now is that a VM could be transferred too fast (by the Qemu process) while the association (in libvirt) happens, Qemu on the source side dies, and then we only get the negative result of the association. Maybe the simplest solution would be if Qemu on the source side waited for a command before transferring the last packet so we still have a chance to cancel and Qemu doesn't just 'run away' underneath libvirt's feet ;-).

I assume that 2 associations with the same profile are possible with 802.1Qbg and Qbh. Both are also going through a Pre-associate state now. Are there any side-effects if associating twice on the same switch like no packets that can be sent on the source side or something like that -- obviously this would be bad if this happened early during live-migration and we'd want to push the association close to the 'final migration phase', which in turn may require more coordination with Qemu (don't know whether the final phase can be determine now -- maybe via polling Qemu's monitor).

Regards,
   Stefan

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