Support for SPICE remote console access was recently added to the Compute (Nova) and Dashboard (Horizon) services. The spice-html5 package required to support SPICE access is however not included in this release. As such SPICE remote console access remains unsupported at this time.

This feature aims to improve the libvirt driver so that it can use large pages for backing the guest RAM allocation. This will improve the performance of guest workloads by increasing TLB cache efficiency. It will ensure that the guest has 100% dedicated RAM that will never be swapped out.

Efficient replication of distributed regions is now possible. Existing replication sends data over unnecessarily. For example, in case of two regions and replication factor of four, a typical spread is to have two replicas per region, assuming uniform weights. If the long-haul link goes down and up, replicators send two copies of every outstanding object across regions. This is not necessary. If only one copy is sent over, replicators of the remote region restore complete redundancy without using the long-haul bandwidth.

This update ensures stable performance during a recovery after an outage in a multi-region cluster. It has no effect inside a one-region datacenter.

After fully upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 from version 6 (and all nodes are running version 7 code), you should start a background migration of PCI device NUMA node information from the old location to the new location. Version 7 conductor nodes will do this automatically when necessary, but the rest of the idle data needs to be migrated in the background. This is critical to complete before the version 8 release, where support for the old location will be dropped. Use '$ nova-manage db migrate_rhos_6_pci_device_data --max-number X' to perform this transition (where X is the maximum number of devices to be migrated in one run).
Note that this is relevant only for users making use of the PCI pass-through features of Compute.

In Kilo, Neutron services now can rely on so called rootwrap daemon to execute external commands like 'ip' or 'sysctl'. The daemon pre-caches rootwrap filters and drastically improves overall agent performance.

For RHEL-OSP7, rootwrap daemon is enabled by default. If you want to avoid using it and stick to another root privilege separation mechanism like 'sudo', then make sure you also disable the daemon by setting 'root_helper_daemon =' in [agent] section of your neutron.conf file.

When using static IP's on the ctlpane network, DNS must be configured on the Overcloud nodes. Previously, DHCP provided the configured DNS servers for the Overcloud nodes.

To configure DNS when using static IPs set the new DnsServers parameter and include it in the Heat environment like so:

parameter_defaults:
  DnsServers:
    - <dns server ip address>
    - <dns server ip address 2>

Use IP addresses for the DNS servers to use. You can only specify either one or two DNS servers.