Placement Usage¶

How Nova Uses Placement¶

Two processes, nova-compute and nova-scheduler, host most of nova’s interaction with placement.

The nova resource tracker in nova-compute is responsible for creating the resource provider record corresponding to the compute host on which the resource tracker runs, setting the inventory that describes the quantitative resources that are available for workloads to consume (e.g., VCPU), and setting the traits that describe qualitative aspects of the resources (e.g., STORAGE_DISK_SSD).

If other projects – for example, Neutron or Cyborg – wish to manage resources on a compute host, they should create resource providers as children of the compute host provider and register their own managed resources as inventory on those child providers. For more information, see the Modeling with Provider Trees.

The nova-scheduler is responsible for selecting a set of suitable destination hosts for a workload. It begins by formulating a request to placement for a list of allocation candidates. That request expresses quantitative and qualitative requirements, membership in aggregates, and in more complex cases, the topology of related resources. That list is reduced and ordered by filters and weighers within the scheduler process. An allocation is made against a resource provider representing a destination, consuming a portion of the inventory set by the resource tracker.