News

Version 2.2.2

(Released Fri, 19 Nov 2010)

A few small bugs fixed, and some improvements to the build system:

  • Fix documentation regarding conversion to drbd
  • Fix validation of parameters in cluster modify (gnt-cluster modify -B)
  • Fix error handling in node modify with multiple changes
  • Allow remote imports without checked names

Version 2.2.1

(Released Tue, 19 Oct 2010)

  • Disable SSL session ID cache in RPC client

Version 2.2.1 rc1

(Released Thu, 14 Oct 2010)

  • Fix interaction between Curl/GnuTLS and the Python’s HTTP server (thanks Apollon Oikonomopoulos!), finally allowing the use of Curl with GnuTLS
  • Fix problems with interaction between Curl and Python’s HTTP server, resulting in increased speed in many RPC calls
  • Improve our release script to prevent breakage with older aclocal and Python 2.6

Version 2.2.1 rc0

(Released Thu, 7 Oct 2010)

  • Fixed issue 125, replace hardcoded “xenvg” in gnt-cluster with value retrieved from master
  • Added support for blacklisted or hidden OS definitions
  • Added simple lock monitor (accessible via (gnt-debug locks)
  • Added support for -mem-path in KVM hypervisor abstraction layer
  • Allow overriding instance parameters in tool for inter-cluster instance moves (tools/move-instance)
  • Improved opcode summaries (e.g. in gnt-job list)
  • Improve consistency of OS listing by sorting it
  • Documentation updates

Version 2.2.0.1

(Released Fri, 8 Oct 2010)

  • Rebuild with a newer autotools version, to fix python 2.6 compatibility

Version 2.2.0

(Released Mon, 4 Oct 2010)

  • Fixed regression in gnt-instance rename

Version 2.2.0 rc2

(Released Wed, 22 Sep 2010)

  • Fixed OS_VARIANT variable for OS scripts
  • Fixed cluster tag operations via RAPI
  • Made setup-ssh exit with non-zero code if an error occurred
  • Disabled RAPI CA checks in watcher

Version 2.2.0 rc1

(Released Mon, 23 Aug 2010)

  • Support DRBD versions of the format “a.b.c.d”
  • Updated manpages
  • Re-introduce support for usage from multiple threads in RAPI client
  • Instance renames and modify via RAPI
  • Work around race condition between processing and archival in job queue
  • Mark opcodes following failed one as failed, too
  • Job field lock_status was removed due to difficulties making it work with the changed job queue in Ganeti 2.2; a better way to monitor locks is expected for a later 2.2.x release
  • Fixed dry-run behaviour with many commands
  • Support ssh-agent again when adding nodes
  • Many additional bugfixes

Version 2.2.0 rc0

(Released Fri, 30 Jul 2010)

Important change: the internal RPC mechanism between Ganeti nodes has changed from using a home-grown http library (based on the Python base libraries) to use the PycURL library. This requires that PycURL is installed on nodes. Please note that on Debian/Ubuntu, PycURL is linked against GnuTLS by default. cURL’s support for GnuTLS had known issues before cURL 7.21.0 and we recommend using the latest cURL release or linking against OpenSSL. Most other distributions already link PycURL and cURL against OpenSSL. The command:

python -c 'import pycurl; print pycurl.version'

can be used to determine the libraries PycURL and cURL are linked against.

Other significant changes:

  • Rewrote much of the internals of the job queue, in order to achieve better parallelism; this decouples job query operations from the job processing, and it should allow much nicer behaviour of the master daemon under load, and it also has uncovered some long-standing bugs related to the job serialisation (now fixed)
  • Added a default iallocator setting to the cluster parameters, eliminating the need to always pass nodes or an iallocator for operations that require selection of new node(s)
  • Added experimental support for the LXC virtualization method
  • Added support for OS parameters, which allows the installation of instances to pass parameter to OS scripts in order to customise the instance
  • Added a hypervisor parameter controlling the migration type (live or non-live), since hypervisors have various levels of reliability; this has renamed the ‘live’ parameter to ‘mode’
  • Added a cluster parameter reserved_lvs that denotes reserved logical volumes, meaning that cluster verify will ignore them and not flag their presence as errors
  • The watcher will now reset the error count for failed instances after 8 hours, thus allowing self-healing if the problem that caused the instances to be down/fail to start has cleared in the meantime
  • Added a cluster parameter drbd_usermode_helper that makes Ganeti check for, and warn, if the drbd module parameter usermode_helper is not consistent with the cluster-wide setting; this is needed to make diagnose easier of failed drbd creations
  • Started adding base IPv6 support, but this is not yet enabled/available for use
  • Rename operations (cluster, instance) will now return the new name, which is especially useful if a short name was passed in
  • Added support for instance migration in RAPI
  • Added a tool to pre-configure nodes for the SSH setup, before joining them to the cluster; this will allow in the future a simplified model for node joining (but not yet fully enabled in 2.2); this needs the paramiko python library
  • Fixed handling of name-resolving errors
  • Fixed consistency of job results on the error path
  • Fixed master-failover race condition when executed multiple times in sequence
  • Fixed many bugs related to the job queue (mostly introduced during the 2.2 development cycle, so not all are impacting 2.1)
  • Fixed instance migration with missing disk symlinks
  • Fixed handling of unknown jobs in gnt-job archive
  • And many other small fixes/improvements

Internal changes:

  • Enhanced both the unittest and the QA coverage
  • Switched the opcode validation to a generic model, and extended the validation to all opcode parameters
  • Changed more parts of the code that write shell scripts to use the same class for this
  • Switched the master daemon to use the asyncore library for the Luxi server endpoint

Version 2.2.0 beta 0

(Released Thu, 17 Jun 2010)

  • Added tool (move-instance) and infrastructure to move instances between separate clusters (see separate documentation and design document)
  • Added per-request RPC timeout
  • RAPI now requires a Content-Type header for requests with a body (e.g. PUT or POST) which must be set to application/json (see RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), section 7.2.1)
  • ganeti-watcher attempts to restart ganeti-rapi if RAPI is not reachable
  • Implemented initial support for running Ganeti daemons as separate users, see configure-time flags --with-user-prefix and --with-group-prefix (only ganeti-rapi is supported at this time)
  • Instances can be removed after export (gnt-backup export --remove-instance)
  • Self-signed certificates generated by Ganeti now use a 2048 bit RSA key (instead of 1024 bit)
  • Added new cluster configuration file for cluster domain secret
  • Import/export now use SSL instead of SSH
  • Added support for showing estimated time when exporting an instance, see the ganeti-os-interface(7) manpage and look for EXP_SIZE_FD

Version 2.1.8

(Released Tue, 16 Nov 2010)

Some more bugfixes. Unless critical bugs occur, this will be the last 2.1 release:

  • Fix case of MAC special-values
  • Fix mac checker regex
  • backend: Fix typo causing “out of range” error
  • Add missing –units in gnt-instance list man page

Version 2.1.7

(Released Tue, 24 Aug 2010)

Bugfixes only:
  • Don’t ignore secondary node silently on non-mirrored disk templates (issue 113)
  • Fix –master-netdev arg name in gnt-cluster(8) (issue 114)
  • Fix usb_mouse parameter breaking with vnc_console (issue 109)
  • Properly document the usb_mouse parameter
  • Fix path in ganeti-rapi(8) (issue 116)
  • Adjust error message when the ganeti user’s .ssh directory is missing
  • Add same-node-check when changing the disk template to drbd

Version 2.1.6

(Released Fri, 16 Jul 2010)

Bugfixes only:
  • Add an option to only select some reboot types during qa/burnin. (on some hypervisors consequent reboots are not supported)
  • Fix infrequent race condition in master failover. Sometimes the old master ip address would be still detected as up for a short time after it was removed, causing failover to fail.
  • Decrease mlockall warnings when the ctypes module is missing. On Python 2.4 we support running even if no ctypes module is installed, but we were too verbose about this issue.
  • Fix building on old distributions, on which man doesn’t have a –warnings option.
  • Fix RAPI not to ignore the MAC address on instance creation
  • Implement the old instance creation format in the RAPI client.

Version 2.1.5

(Released Thu, 01 Jul 2010)

A small bugfix release:
  • Fix disk adoption: broken by strict –disk option checking in 2.1.4
  • Fix batch-create: broken in the whole 2.1 series due to a lookup on a non-existing option
  • Fix instance create: the –force-variant option was ignored
  • Improve pylint 0.21 compatibility and warnings with Python 2.6
  • Fix modify node storage with non-FQDN arguments
  • Fix RAPI client to authenticate under Python 2.6 when used for more than 5 requests needing authentication
  • Fix gnt-instance modify -t (storage) giving a wrong error message when converting a non-shutdown drbd instance to plain

Version 2.1.4

(Released Fri, 18 Jun 2010)

A small bugfix release:

  • Fix live migration of KVM instances started with older Ganeti versions which had fewer hypervisor parameters
  • Fix gnt-instance grow-disk on down instances
  • Fix an error-reporting bug during instance migration
  • Better checking of the --net and --disk values, to avoid silently ignoring broken ones
  • Fix an RPC error reporting bug affecting, for example, RAPI client users
  • Fix bug triggered by different API version os-es on different nodes
  • Fix a bug in instance startup with custom hvparams: OS level parameters would fail to be applied.
  • Fix the RAPI client under Python 2.6 (but more work is needed to make it work completely well with OpenSSL)
  • Fix handling of errors when resolving names from DNS

Version 2.1.3

(Released Thu, 3 Jun 2010)

A medium sized development cycle. Some new features, and some fixes/small improvements/cleanups.

Significant features

The node deamon now tries to mlock itself into memory, unless the --no-mlock flag is passed. It also doesn’t fail if it can’t write its logs, and falls back to console logging. This allows emergency features such as gnt-node powercycle to work even in the event of a broken node disk (tested offlining the disk hosting the node’s filesystem and dropping its memory caches; don’t try this at home)

KVM: add vhost-net acceleration support. It can be tested with a new enough version of the kernel and of qemu-kvm.

KVM: Add instance chrooting feature. If you use privilege dropping for your VMs you can also now force them to chroot to an empty directory, before starting the emulated guest.

KVM: Add maximum migration bandwith and maximum downtime tweaking support (requires a new-enough version of qemu-kvm).

Cluster verify will now warn if the master node doesn’t have the master ip configured on it.

Add a new (incompatible) instance creation request format to RAPI which supports all parameters (previously only a subset was supported, and it wasn’t possible to extend the old format to accomodate all the new features. The old format is still supported, and a client can check for this feature, before using it, by checking for its presence in the features RAPI resource.

Now with ancient latin support. Try it passing the --roman option to gnt-instance info, gnt-cluster info or gnt-node list (requires the python-roman module to be installed, in order to work).

Other changes

As usual many internal code refactorings, documentation updates, and such. Among others:

  • Lots of improvements and cleanups to the experimental Remote API (RAPI) client library.
  • A new unit test suite for the core daemon libraries.
  • A fix to creating missing directories makes sure the umask is not applied anymore. This enforces the same directory permissions everywhere.
  • Better handling terminating daemons with ctrl+c (used when running them in debugging mode).
  • Fix a race condition in live migrating a KVM instance, when stat() on the old proc status file returned EINVAL, which is an unexpected value.
  • Fixed manpage checking with newer man and utf-8 charachters. But now you need the en_US.UTF-8 locale enabled to build Ganeti from git.

Version 2.1.2.1

(Released Fri, 7 May 2010)

Fix a bug which prevented untagged KVM instances from starting.

Version 2.1.2

(Released Fri, 7 May 2010)

Another release with a long development cycle, during which many different features were added.

Significant features

The KVM hypervisor now can run the individual instances as non-root, to reduce the impact of a VM being hijacked due to bugs in the hypervisor. It is possible to run all instances as a single (non-root) user, to manually specify a user for each instance, or to dynamically allocate a user out of a cluster-wide pool to each instance, with the guarantee that no two instances will run under the same user ID on any given node.

An experimental RAPI client library, that can be used standalone (without the other Ganeti libraries), is provided in the source tree as lib/rapi/client.py. Note this client might change its interface in the future, as we iterate on its capabilities.

A new command, gnt-cluster renew-crypto has been added to easily replace the cluster’s certificates and crypto keys. This might help in case they have been compromised, or have simply expired.

A new disk option for instance creation has been added that allows one to “adopt” currently existing logical volumes, with data preservation. This should allow easier migration to Ganeti from unmanaged (or managed via other software) instances.

Another disk improvement is the possibility to convert between redundant (DRBD) and plain (LVM) disk configuration for an instance. This should allow better scalability (starting with one node and growing the cluster, or shrinking a two-node cluster to one node).

A new feature that could help with automated node failovers has been implemented: if a node sees itself as offline (by querying the master candidates), it will try to shutdown (hard) all instances and any active DRBD devices. This reduces the risk of duplicate instances if an external script automatically failovers the instances on such nodes. To enable this, the cluster parameter maintain_node_health should be enabled; in the future this option (per the name) will enable other automatic maintenance features.

Instance export/import now will reuse the original instance specifications for all parameters; that means exporting an instance, deleting it and the importing it back should give an almost identical instance. Note that the default import behaviour has changed from before, where it created only one NIC; now it recreates the original number of NICs.

Cluster verify has added a few new checks: SSL certificates validity, /etc/hosts consistency across the cluster, etc.

Other changes

As usual, many internal changes were done, documentation fixes, etc. Among others:

  • Fixed cluster initialization with disabled cluster storage (regression introduced in 2.1.1)
  • File-based storage supports growing the disks
  • Fixed behaviour of node role changes
  • Fixed cluster verify for some corner cases, plus a general rewrite of cluster verify to allow future extension with more checks
  • Fixed log spamming by watcher and node daemon (regression introduced in 2.1.1)
  • Fixed possible validation issues when changing the list of enabled hypervisors
  • Fixed cleanup of /etc/hosts during node removal
  • Fixed RAPI response for invalid methods
  • Fixed bug with hashed passwords in ganeti-rapi daemon
  • Multiple small improvements to the KVM hypervisor (VNC usage, booting from ide disks, etc.)
  • Allow OS changes without re-installation (to record a changed OS outside of Ganeti, or to allow OS renames)
  • Allow instance creation without OS installation (useful for example if the OS will be installed manually, or restored from a backup not in Ganeti format)
  • Implemented option to make cluster copyfile use the replication network
  • Added list of enabled hypervisors to ssconf (possibly useful for external scripts)
  • Added a new tool (tools/cfgupgrade12) that allows upgrading from 1.2 clusters
  • A partial form of node re-IP is possible via node readd, which now allows changed node primary IP
  • Command line utilities now show an informational message if the job is waiting for a lock
  • The logs of the master daemon now show the PID/UID/GID of the connected client

Version 2.1.1

(Released Fri, 12 Mar 2010)

During the 2.1.0 long release candidate cycle, a lot of improvements and changes have accumulated with were released later as 2.1.1.

Major changes

The node evacuate command (gnt-node evacuate) was significantly rewritten, and as such the IAllocator protocol was changed - a new request type has been added. This unfortunate change during a stable series is designed to improve performance of node evacuations; on clusters with more than about five nodes and which are well-balanced, evacuation should proceed in parallel for all instances of the node being evacuated. As such, any existing IAllocator scripts need to be updated, otherwise the above command will fail due to the unknown request. The provided “dumb” allocator has not been updated; but the ganeti-htools package supports the new protocol since version 0.2.4.

Another important change is increased validation of node and instance names. This might create problems in special cases, if invalid host names are being used.

Also, a new layer of hypervisor parameters has been added, that sits at OS level between the cluster defaults and the instance ones. This allows customisation of virtualization parameters depending on the installed OS. For example instances with OS ‘X’ may have a different KVM kernel (or any other parameter) than the cluster defaults. This is intended to help managing a multiple OSes on the same cluster, without manual modification of each instance’s parameters.

A tool for merging clusters, cluster-merge, has been added in the tools sub-directory.

Bug fixes

  • Improved the int/float conversions that should make the code more robust in face of errors from the node daemons
  • Fixed the remove node code in case of internal configuration errors
  • Fixed the node daemon behaviour in face of inconsistent queue directory (e.g. read-only file-system where we can’t open the files read-write, etc.)
  • Fixed the behaviour of gnt-node modify for master candidate demotion; now it either aborts cleanly or, if given the new “auto_promote” parameter, will automatically promote other nodes as needed
  • Fixed compatibility with (unreleased yet) Python 2.6.5 that would completely prevent Ganeti from working
  • Fixed bug for instance export when not all disks were successfully exported
  • Fixed behaviour of node add when the new node is slow in starting up the node daemon
  • Fixed handling of signals in the LUXI client, which should improve behaviour of command-line scripts
  • Added checks for invalid node/instance names in the configuration (now flagged during cluster verify)
  • Fixed watcher behaviour for disk activation errors
  • Fixed two potentially endless loops in http library, which led to the RAPI daemon hanging and consuming 100% CPU in some cases
  • Fixed bug in RAPI daemon related to hashed passwords
  • Fixed bug for unintended qemu-level bridging of multi-NIC KVM instances
  • Enhanced compatibility with non-Debian OSes, but not using absolute path in some commands and allowing customisation of the ssh configuration directory
  • Fixed possible future issue with new Python versions by abiding to the proper use of __slots__ attribute on classes
  • Added checks that should prevent directory traversal attacks
  • Many documentation fixes based on feedback from users

New features

  • Added an “early_release” more for instance replace disks and node evacuate, where we release locks earlier and thus allow higher parallelism within the cluster
  • Added watcher hooks, intended to allow the watcher to restart other daemons (e.g. from the ganeti-nbma project), but they can be used of course for any other purpose
  • Added a compile-time disable for DRBD barriers, to increase performance if the administrator trusts the power supply or the storage system to not lose writes
  • Added the option of using syslog for logging instead of, or in addition to, Ganeti’s own log files
  • Removed boot restriction for paravirtual NICs for KVM, recent versions can indeed boot from a paravirtual NIC
  • Added a generic debug level for many operations; while this is not used widely yet, it allows one to pass the debug value all the way to the OS scripts
  • Enhanced the hooks environment for instance moves (failovers, migrations) where the primary/secondary nodes changed during the operation, by adding {NEW,OLD}_{PRIMARY,SECONDARY} vars
  • Enhanced data validations for many user-supplied values; one important item is the restrictions imposed on instance and node names, which might reject some (invalid) host names
  • Add a configure-time option to disable file-based storage, if it’s not needed; this allows greater security separation between the master node and the other nodes from the point of view of the inter-node RPC protocol
  • Added user notification in interactive tools if job is waiting in the job queue or trying to acquire locks
  • Added log messages when a job is waiting for locks
  • Added filtering by node tags in instance operations which admit multiple instances (start, stop, reboot, reinstall)
  • Added a new tool for cluster mergers, cluster-merge
  • Parameters from command line which are of the form a=b,c=d can now use backslash escapes to pass in values which contain commas, e.g. a=b\\c,d=e where the ‘a’ parameter would get the value b,c
  • For KVM, the instance name is the first parameter passed to KVM, so that it’s more visible in the process list

Version 2.1.0

(Released Tue, 2 Mar 2010)

Ganeti 2.1 brings many improvements with it. Major changes:

  • Added infrastructure to ease automated disk repairs
  • Added new daemon to export configuration data in a cheaper way than using the remote API
  • Instance NICs can now be routed instead of being associated with a networking bridge
  • Improved job locking logic to reduce impact of jobs acquiring multiple locks waiting for other long-running jobs

In-depth implementation details can be found in the Ganeti 2.1 design document.

Details

  • Added chroot hypervisor
  • Added more options to xen-hvm hypervisor (kernel_path and device_model)
  • Added more options to xen-pvm hypervisor (use_bootloader, bootloader_path and bootloader_args)
  • Added the use_localtime option for the xen-hvm and kvm hypervisors, and the default value for this has changed to false (in 2.0 xen-hvm always enabled it)
  • Added luxi call to submit multiple jobs in one go
  • Added cluster initialization option to not modify /etc/hosts file on nodes
  • Added network interface parameters
  • Added dry run mode to some LUs
  • Added RAPI resources:
    • /2/instances/[instance_name]/info
    • /2/instances/[instance_name]/replace-disks
    • /2/nodes/[node_name]/evacuate
    • /2/nodes/[node_name]/migrate
    • /2/nodes/[node_name]/role
    • /2/nodes/[node_name]/storage
    • /2/nodes/[node_name]/storage/modify
    • /2/nodes/[node_name]/storage/repair
  • Added OpCodes to evacuate or migrate all instances on a node
  • Added new command to list storage elements on nodes (gnt-node list-storage) and modify them (gnt-node modify-storage)
  • Added new ssconf files with master candidate IP address (ssconf_master_candidates_ips), node primary IP address (ssconf_node_primary_ips) and node secondary IP address (ssconf_node_secondary_ips)
  • Added ganeti-confd and a client library to query the Ganeti configuration via UDP
  • Added ability to run hooks after cluster initialization and before cluster destruction
  • Added automatic mode for disk replace (gnt-instance replace-disks --auto)
  • Added gnt-instance recreate-disks to re-create (empty) disks after catastrophic data-loss
  • Added gnt-node repair-storage command to repair damaged LVM volume groups
  • Added gnt-instance move command to move instances
  • Added gnt-cluster watcher command to control watcher
  • Added gnt-node powercycle command to powercycle nodes
  • Added new job status field lock_status
  • Added parseable error codes to cluster verification (gnt-cluster verify --error-codes) and made output less verbose (use --verbose to restore previous behaviour)
  • Added UUIDs to the main config entities (cluster, nodes, instances)
  • Added support for OS variants
  • Added support for hashed passwords in the Ganeti remote API users file (rapi_users)
  • Added option to specify maximum timeout on instance shutdown
  • Added --no-ssh-init option to gnt-cluster init
  • Added new helper script to start and stop Ganeti daemons (daemon-util), with the intent to reduce the work necessary to adjust Ganeti for non-Debian distributions and to start/stop daemons from one place
  • Added more unittests
  • Fixed critical bug in ganeti-masterd startup
  • Removed the configure-time kvm-migration-port parameter, this is now customisable at the cluster level for both the KVM and Xen hypervisors using the new migration_port parameter
  • Pass INSTANCE_REINSTALL variable to OS installation script when reinstalling an instance
  • Allowed @ in tag names
  • Migrated to Sphinx (http://sphinx.pocoo.org/) for documentation
  • Many documentation updates
  • Distribute hypervisor files on gnt-cluster redist-conf
  • gnt-instance reinstall can now reinstall multiple instances
  • Updated many command line parameters
  • Introduced new OS API version 15
  • No longer support a default hypervisor
  • Treat virtual LVs as inexistent
  • Improved job locking logic to reduce lock contention
  • Match instance and node names case insensitively
  • Reimplemented bash completion script to be more complete
  • Improved burnin

Version 2.0.6

(Released Thu, 4 Feb 2010)

  • Fix cleaner behaviour on nodes not in a cluster (Debian bug 568105)
  • Fix a string formatting bug
  • Improve safety of the code in some error paths
  • Improve data validation in the master of values returned from nodes

Version 2.0.5

(Released Thu, 17 Dec 2009)

  • Fix security issue due to missing validation of iallocator names; this allows local and remote execution of arbitrary executables
  • Fix failure of gnt-node list during instance removal
  • Ship the RAPI documentation in the archive

Version 2.0.4

(Released Wed, 30 Sep 2009)

  • Fixed many wrong messages
  • Fixed a few bugs related to the locking library
  • Fixed MAC checking at instance creation time
  • Fixed a DRBD parsing bug related to gaps in /proc/drbd
  • Fixed a few issues related to signal handling in both daemons and scripts
  • Fixed the example startup script provided
  • Fixed insserv dependencies in the example startup script (patch from Debian)
  • Fixed handling of drained nodes in the iallocator framework
  • Fixed handling of KERNEL_PATH parameter for xen-hvm (Debian bug #528618)
  • Fixed error related to invalid job IDs in job polling
  • Fixed job/opcode persistence on unclean master shutdown
  • Fixed handling of partial job processing after unclean master shutdown
  • Fixed error reporting from LUs, previously all errors were converted into execution errors
  • Fixed error reporting from burnin
  • Decreased significantly the memory usage of the job queue
  • Optimised slightly multi-job submission
  • Optimised slightly opcode loading
  • Backported the multi-job submit framework from the development branch; multi-instance start and stop should be faster
  • Added script to clean archived jobs after 21 days; this will reduce the size of the queue directory
  • Added some extra checks in disk size tracking
  • Added an example ethers hook script
  • Added a cluster parameter that prevents Ganeti from modifying of /etc/hosts
  • Added more node information to RAPI responses
  • Added a gnt-job watch command that allows following the ouput of a job
  • Added a bind-address option to ganeti-rapi
  • Added more checks to the configuration verify
  • Enhanced the burnin script such that some operations can be retried automatically
  • Converted instance reinstall to multi-instance model

Version 2.0.3

(Released Fri, 7 Aug 2009)

  • Added --ignore-size to the gnt-instance activate-disks command to allow using the pre-2.0.2 behaviour in activation, if any existing instances have mismatched disk sizes in the configuration
  • Added gnt-cluster repair-disk-sizes command to check and update any configuration mismatches for disk sizes
  • Added gnt-master cluste-failover --no-voting to allow master failover to work on two-node clusters
  • Fixed the --net option of gnt-backup import, which was unusable
  • Fixed detection of OS script errors in gnt-backup export
  • Fixed exit code of gnt-backup export

Version 2.0.2

(Released Fri, 17 Jul 2009)

  • Added experimental support for stripped logical volumes; this should enhance performance but comes with a higher complexity in the block device handling; stripping is only enabled when passing --with-lvm-stripecount=N to configure, but codepaths are affected even in the non-stripped mode
  • Improved resiliency against transient failures at the end of DRBD resyncs, and in general of DRBD resync checks
  • Fixed a couple of issues with exports and snapshot errors
  • Fixed a couple of issues in instance listing
  • Added display of the disk size in gnt-instance info
  • Fixed checking for valid OSes in instance creation
  • Fixed handling of the “vcpus” parameter in instance listing and in general of invalid parameters
  • Fixed http server library, and thus RAPI, to handle invalid username/password combinations correctly; this means that now they report unauthorized for queries too, not only for modifications, allowing earlier detect of configuration problems
  • Added a new “role” node list field, equivalent to the master/master candidate/drained/offline flags combinations
  • Fixed cluster modify and changes of candidate pool size
  • Fixed cluster verify error messages for wrong files on regular nodes
  • Fixed a couple of issues with node demotion from master candidate role
  • Fixed node readd issues
  • Added non-interactive mode for ganeti-masterd --no-voting startup
  • Added a new --no-voting option for masterfailover to fix failover on two-nodes clusters when the former master node is unreachable
  • Added instance reinstall over RAPI

Version 2.0.1

(Released Tue, 16 Jun 2009)

  • added -H/-B startup parameters to gnt-instance, which will allow re-adding the start in single-user option (regression from 1.2)
  • the watcher writes the instance status to a file, to allow monitoring to report the instance status (from the master) based on cached results of the watcher’s queries; while this can get stale if the watcher is being locked due to other work on the cluster, this is still an improvement
  • the watcher now also restarts the node daemon and the rapi daemon if they died
  • fixed the watcher to handle full and drained queue cases
  • hooks export more instance data in the environment, which helps if hook scripts need to take action based on the instance’s properties (no longer need to query back into ganeti)
  • instance failovers when the instance is stopped do not check for free RAM, so that failing over a stopped instance is possible in low memory situations
  • rapi uses queries for tags instead of jobs (for less job traffic), and for cluster tags it won’t talk to masterd at all but read them from ssconf
  • a couple of error handling fixes in RAPI
  • drbd handling: improved the error handling of inconsistent disks after resync to reduce the frequency of “there are some degraded disks for this instance” messages
  • fixed a bug in live migration when DRBD doesn’t want to reconnect (the error handling path called a wrong function name)

Version 2.0.0 final

(Released Wed, 27 May 2009)

  • no changes from rc5

Version 2.0 release candidate 5

(Released Wed, 20 May 2009)

  • fix a couple of bugs (validation, argument checks)
  • fix gnt-cluster getmaster on non-master nodes (regression)
  • some small improvements to RAPI and IAllocator
  • make watcher automatically start the master daemon if down

Version 2.0 release candidate 4

(Released Mon, 27 Apr 2009)

  • change the OS list to not require locks; this helps with big clusters
  • fix gnt-cluster verify and gnt-cluster verify-disks when the volume group is broken
  • gnt-instance info, without any arguments, doesn’t run for all instances anymore; either pass --all or pass the desired instances; this helps against mistakes on big clusters where listing the information for all instances takes a long time
  • miscellaneous doc and man pages fixes

Version 2.0 release candidate 3

(Released Wed, 8 Apr 2009)

  • Change the internal locking model of some gnt-node commands, in order to reduce contention (and blocking of master daemon) when batching many creation/reinstall jobs
  • Fixes to Xen soft reboot
  • No longer build documentation at build time, instead distribute it in the archive, in order to reduce the need for the whole docbook/rst toolchains

Version 2.0 release candidate 2

(Released Fri, 27 Mar 2009)

  • Now the cfgupgrade scripts works and can upgrade 1.2.7 clusters to 2.0
  • Fix watcher startup sequence, improves the behaviour of busy clusters
  • Some other fixes in gnt-cluster verify, gnt-instance replace-disks, gnt-instance add, gnt-cluster queue, KVM VNC bind address and other places
  • Some documentation fixes and updates

Version 2.0 release candidate 1

(Released Mon, 2 Mar 2009)

  • More documentation updates, now all docs should be more-or-less up-to-date
  • A couple of small fixes (mixed hypervisor clusters, offline nodes, etc.)
  • Added a customizable HV_KERNEL_ARGS hypervisor parameter (for Xen PVM and KVM)
  • Fix an issue related to $libdir/run/ganeti and cluster creation

Version 2.0 beta 2

(Released Thu, 19 Feb 2009)

  • Xen PVM and KVM have switched the default value for the instance root disk to the first partition on the first drive, instead of the whole drive; this means that the OS installation scripts must be changed accordingly
  • Man pages have been updated
  • RAPI has been switched by default to HTTPS, and the exported functions should all work correctly
  • RAPI v1 has been removed
  • Many improvements to the KVM hypervisor
  • Block device errors are now better reported
  • Many other bugfixes and small improvements

Version 2.0 beta 1

(Released Mon, 26 Jan 2009)

  • Version 2 is a general rewrite of the code and therefore the differences are too many to list, see the design document for 2.0 in the doc/ subdirectory for more details
  • In this beta version there is not yet a migration path from 1.2 (there will be one in the final 2.0 release)
  • A few significant changes are:
    • all commands are executed by a daemon (ganeti-masterd) and the various gnt-* commands are just front-ends to it
    • all the commands are entered into, and executed from a job queue, see the gnt-job(8) manpage
    • the RAPI daemon supports read-write operations, secured by basic HTTP authentication on top of HTTPS
    • DRBD version 0.7 support has been removed, DRBD 8 is the only supported version (when migrating from Ganeti 1.2 to 2.0, you need to migrate to DRBD 8 first while still running Ganeti 1.2)
    • DRBD devices are using statically allocated minor numbers, which will be assigned to existing instances during the migration process
    • there is support for both Xen PVM and Xen HVM instances running on the same cluster
    • KVM virtualization is supported too
    • file-based storage has been implemented, which means that it is possible to run the cluster without LVM and DRBD storage, for example using a shared filesystem exported from shared storage (and still have live migration)

Version 1.2.7

(Released Tue, 13 Jan 2009)

  • Change the default reboot type in gnt-instance reboot to “hard”
  • Reuse the old instance mac address by default on instance import, if the instance name is the same.
  • Handle situations in which the node info rpc returns incomplete results (issue 46)
  • Add checks for tcp/udp ports collisions in gnt-cluster verify
  • Improved version of batcher:
    • state file support
    • instance mac address support
    • support for HVM clusters/instances
  • Add an option to show the number of cpu sockets and nodes in gnt-node list
  • Support OSes that handle more than one version of the OS api (but do not change the current API in any other way)
  • Fix gnt-node migrate
  • gnt-debug man page
  • Fixes various more typos and small issues
  • Increase disk resync maximum speed to 60MB/s (from 30MB/s)

Version 1.2.6

(Released Wed, 24 Sep 2008)

  • new --hvm-nic-type and --hvm-disk-type flags to control the type of disk exported to fully virtualized instances.
  • provide access to the serial console of HVM instances
  • instance auto_balance flag, set by default. If turned off it will avoid warnings on cluster verify if there is not enough memory to fail over an instance. in the future it will prevent automatically failing it over when we will support that.
  • batcher tool for instance creation, see tools/README.batcher
  • gnt-instance reinstall --select-os to interactively select a new operating system when reinstalling an instance.
  • when changing the memory amount on instance modify a check has been added that the instance will be able to start. also warnings are emitted if the instance will not be able to fail over, if auto_balance is true.
  • documentation fixes
  • sync fields between gnt-instance list/modify/add/import
  • fix a race condition in drbd when the sync speed was set after giving the device a remote peer.

Version 1.2.5

(Released Tue, 22 Jul 2008)

  • note: the allowed size and number of tags per object were reduced
  • fix a bug in gnt-cluster verify with inconsistent volume groups
  • fixed twisted 8.x compatibility
  • fixed gnt-instance replace-disks with iallocator
  • add TCP keepalives on twisted connections to detect restarted nodes
  • disk increase support, see gnt-instance grow-disk
  • implement bulk node/instance query for RAPI
  • add tags in node/instance listing (optional)
  • experimental migration (and live migration) support, read the man page for gnt-instance migrate
  • the ganeti-watcher logs are now timestamped, and the watcher also has some small improvements in handling its state file

Version 1.2.4

(Released Fri, 13 Jun 2008)

  • Experimental readonly, REST-based remote API implementation; automatically started on master node, TCP port 5080, if enabled by --enable-rapi parameter to configure script.
  • Instance allocator support. Add and import instance accept a --iallocator parameter, and call that instance allocator to decide which node to use for the instance. The iallocator document describes what’s expected from an allocator script.
  • gnt-cluster verify N+1 memory redundancy checks: Unless passed the --no-nplus1-mem option gnt-cluster verify now checks that if a node is lost there is still enough memory to fail over the instances that reside on it.
  • gnt-cluster verify hooks: it is now possible to add post-hooks to gnt-cluster verify, to check for site-specific compliance. All the hooks will run, and their output, if any, will be displayed. Any failing hook will make the verification return an error value.
  • gnt-cluster verify now checks that its peers are reachable on the primary and secondary interfaces
  • gnt-node add now supports the --readd option, to readd a node that is still declared as part of the cluster and has failed.
  • gnt-* list commands now accept a new -o +field way of specifying output fields, that just adds the chosen fields to the default ones.
  • gnt-backup now has a new remove command to delete an existing export from the filesystem.
  • New per-instance parameters hvm_acpi, hvm_pae and hvm_cdrom_image_path have been added. Using them you can enable/disable acpi and pae support, and specify a path for a cd image to be exported to the instance. These parameters as the name suggest only work on HVM clusters.
  • When upgrading an HVM cluster to Ganeti 1.2.4, the values for ACPI and PAE support will be set to the previously hardcoded values, but the (previously hardcoded) path to the CDROM ISO image will be unset and if required, needs to be set manually with gnt-instance modify after the upgrade.
  • The address to which an instance’s VNC console is bound is now selectable per-instance, rather than being cluster wide. Of course this only applies to instances controlled via VNC, so currently just applies to HVM clusters.

Version 1.2.3

(Released Mon, 18 Feb 2008)

  • more tweaks to the disk activation code (especially helpful for DRBD)
  • change the default gnt-instance list output format, now there is one combined status field (see the manpage for the exact values this field will have)
  • some more fixes for the mac export to hooks change
  • make Ganeti not break with DRBD 8.2.x (which changed the version format in /proc/drbd) (issue 24)
  • add an upgrade tool from “remote_raid1” disk template to “drbd” disk template, allowing migration from DRBD0.7+MD to DRBD8

Version 1.2.2

(Released Wed, 30 Jan 2008)

  • fix gnt-instance modify breakage introduced in 1.2.1 with the HVM support (issue 23)
  • add command aliases infrastructure and a few aliases
  • allow listing of VCPUs in the gnt-instance list and improve the man pages and the --help option of gnt-node list/gnt-instance list
  • fix gnt-backup list with down nodes (issue 21)
  • change the tools location (move from $pkgdatadir to $pkglibdir/tools)
  • fix the dist archive and add a check for including svn/git files in the future
  • some developer-related changes: improve the burnin and the QA suite, add an upload script for testing during development

Version 1.2.1

(Released Wed, 16 Jan 2008)

  • experimental HVM support, read the install document, section “Initializing the cluster”
  • allow for the PVM hypervisor per-instance kernel and initrd paths
  • add a new command gnt-cluster verify-disks which uses a new algorithm to improve the reconnection of the DRBD pairs if the device on the secondary node has gone away
  • make logical volume code auto-activate LVs at disk activation time
  • slightly improve the speed of activating disks
  • allow specification of the MAC address at instance creation time, and changing it later via gnt-instance modify
  • fix handling of external commands that generate lots of output on stderr
  • update documentation with regard to minimum version of DRBD8 supported

Version 1.2.0

(Released Tue, 4 Dec 2007)

  • Log the xm create output to the node daemon log on failure (to help diagnosing the error)
  • In debug mode, log all external commands output if failed to the logs
  • Change parsing of lvm commands to ignore stderr

Version 1.2b3

(Released Wed, 28 Nov 2007)

  • Another round of updates to the DRBD 8 code to deal with more failures in the replace secondary node operation
  • Some more logging of failures in disk operations (lvm, drbd)
  • A few documentation updates
  • QA updates

Version 1.2b2

(Released Tue, 13 Nov 2007)

  • Change configuration file format from Python’s Pickle to JSON. Upgrading is possible using the cfgupgrade utility.
  • Add support for DRBD 8.0 (new disk template drbd) which allows for faster replace disks and is more stable (DRBD 8 has many improvements compared to DRBD 0.7)
  • Added command line tags support (see man pages for gnt-instance, gnt-node, gnt-cluster)
  • Added instance rename support
  • Added multi-instance startup/shutdown
  • Added cluster rename support
  • Added gnt-node evacuate to simplify some node operations
  • Added instance reboot operation that can speedup reboot as compared to stop and start
  • Soften the requirement that hostnames are in FQDN format
  • The ganeti-watcher now activates drbd pairs after secondary node reboots
  • Removed dependency on debian’s patched fping that uses the non-standard -S option
  • Now the OS definitions are searched for in multiple, configurable paths (easier for distros to package)
  • Some changes to the hooks infrastructure (especially the new post-configuration update hook)
  • Other small bugfixes