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Table of Contents

• Create an Affinity Group
• Add instance to affinity group
• No valid host was found
• How to enable Affinity/Anti-Affinity (Admin Only)

This guide shows you how to use Openstack Affinity groups. Affinity or Anti- Affinity groups allow you to make sure instances (VM/VPS) are on the same hypervisor host or on a different one. There are cases when you want two instances on different compute nodes, for example, when they are clustered servers like a load balancer or a database master-master setup. All VM's in each Affinity group are hosted in the same hypervisor, while no two VM's of a same Anti-Affinity group are hosted in the same hypervisor.

Affinity is supported since Openstack IceHouse. You can only add an instance to an affinity group when you create the instance with nova boot. You can not add existing instances. You can however create an image of an instance and boot a new server from that image, in the new affinity group.

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Create an Affinity Group

Make sure you have the Openstack Command Line Tools installed. Also make sure you have a computerc file. See the first part of this page to find out how to do that.

The command syntax to create an affinity group with the novaclient:

nova server-group-create $group-name $policy

• $group-name is a name you choose
• $policy is either affinity or anti-affinity.

If you want all servers to run on the same hypervisor host, create a group with an affinity policy.

If you want all servers to run on different hypervisor host, create a group with an anti-affinity policy. This means that if you have 5 servers in this group, they will be on 5 different hypervisor (compute) nodes, never will a VM be on a host node where another VM from this affinity policy is.

You can see all available affinity groups with server-group-list:

$ nova server-group-list
+--------------------------------------+------+--------------------+---------+----------+
| Id                                   | Name | Policies           | Members | Metadata |
+--------------------------------------+------+--------------------+---------+----------+
| 415eea22-4e37-44e0-a4c9-59c395688fc8 | Anti | [u'anti-affinity'] | []      | {}       |
+--------------------------------------+------+--------------------+---------+----------+

You can delete a server group with server-group-delete. Deleting a server group does not delete all the vm's in that group. The policy is removed from the vm's, so they can be on the same node, or on different ones. Exclusivity is not guaranteed anymore.

Add instance to affinity group

You can only add a server to an affinity group when you create the instance. Not afterwards. To add an instance to an affinity group, use the following extra option when executing nova boot:

--hint group=$affinity-group-uuid

Example commands:

nova boot --image "CloudVPS Ubuntu 14.04" --hint group=415eea22-4e37-44e0-a4c9-59c395688fc8 --key-name $ssh_key --flavor "Standard 1" "Anti-Affinity 1-1"

nova boot --image "CloudVPS Ubuntu 14.04" --hint group=415eea22-4e37-44e0-a4c9-59c395688fc8 --key-name $ssh_key --flavor "Standard 1" "Anti-Affinity 1-2"

nova boot --image "CloudVPS Ubuntu 14.04" --hint group=415eea22-4e37-44e0-a4c9-59c395688fc8 --key-name $ssh_key --flavor "Standard 1" "Anti-Affinity 1-3"

nova boot --image "CloudVPS Ubuntu 14.04" --hint group=415eea22-4e37-44e0-a4c9-59c395688fc8 --key-name $ssh_key --flavor "Standard 1" "Anti-Affinity 1-4"

These 4 servers will be on different hypervisor hosts. You can check this with the nova show command:

nova show $instance_uuid

Look for the hostId value:

| hostId     | 4b499ffc320810e06891d15fca10a4ac76a50eae788d2f28a990fbbf     |

This is the hostId of the hosting compute hypervisor node. With an Anti-Affinity policy, these are different. With an Affinity Policy, these are the same.

No valid host was found

If you reveive the No valid host was found error during the nova boot command, that means that there are no hosts that have the capacity to host that VM and guarantee there will not be another VM from that anti-affinity group on it (in the case of an anti affinity group). It can also mean that the hypervisor has not enoigh free capacity (in the case of an affinity group).

This might mean that your Openstack provider has put restrictions on the filters or is low on free capacity. Affinity policies are limited by the available resources of the current hypervisor that hosts the group, while Anti-Affinity policies are limited by the number of available hypervisors in the datacenter (after filtering).

If you want your load balancers, app servers and database servers on different compute nodes from each other (with the same role) then you can create 3 anti- affinity groups, one for the load balancers, one for the app servers and one for the database servers. Your app server might be on a host node with a load balancer, but not with another app server.

How to enable Affinity/Anti-Affinity (Admin Only)

Enabling Affinity and Anti-Afiinity is simply done by adding ServerGroupAffinityFilter and ServerGroupAntiAffinityFilter into scheduler_default_filters. By default these filters are already enabled:

# nova.conf
scheduler_default_filters = ServerGroupAffinityFilter,ServerGroupAntiAffinityFilter

To read more about the Openstack filtering options, see the official documentation: .

Tags: affinity , anti-affinity , articles , cloud , cluster , compute , nova , openstack