OpenStack Summit May 2014 Atlanta

The Libvirt driver for Nova is one of the most comprehensive implementations across all supported hypervisors. It is quite common for new functionality to be added Libvirt before it hits the others. API calls to manage instances generally translate to a complex set of interactions between Nova, Libvirt and QEMU/KVM.
During this talk, we will go under the hood to understand exactly what our KVM hypervisors are doing when various requests are made. This includes a deep dive into the sequence of operations when an instance is spawned, resized, migrated (live and cold), rebuilt or snapshot, to name a few. Which areas are most brittle and why? What happens when these operations fail of complete impartially? How can we recover? You will be able to answer these and many other related questions once we are through this technical jam session.
We will also cover some of the functionality added for Ice House and the new Libvirt and KVM capabilities driving Nova-related development.