OpenNebula 5.0 and the BOOT attribute

Community Support
1

Hi

I was testing the new BOOT features:
http://docs.opennebula.org/5.0/intro_release_notes/release_notes/compatibility.html#opennebula-administrators-and-users

It’s nice to be able to boot from any device and also to be able to choose the order, the problem that I found was that the previous BOOT attribute like hd,net,cdrom is now ignored. The problem is that this change is backwards incompatible. In our case, for example, we generate the VM templates automatically from a configuration manager, and also it sets the BOOT attribute to net,hd for some testing VMs. Those VMs are installed using PXE for example, the disk is empty during the first boot. The problem with this change is that the “old” template is not working any more, the BOOT value is ignored and kvm tries to start the VM from the image by default (that is not ready yet and the boot fails)

I think that the new BOOT feature is very useful but, it would be possible to keep the previous value as well? just to keep the backwards compatibility, or at least could be possible to be managed by ONE to translate the old list by the new one? I mean if we have net,hd in our template this would be translated to the first nic available and hd nic0, hd0. That’s is possible?, or maybe you know another workaround…

Cheers and thanks!
Alvaro

2

Hi Alvaro,

Thanks for the feedback… Currently there is no direct translation from
net to nic0 or hd to disk0. We decided to introduce this change because of
the boot order change and because it can be tricky to determine the boot
device when multiple disks (because of the sorting process) In general I’d
say that updating the external utility is safer because it gives you full
control of the boot order.

Cheers

Ruben