Chapter 7. Attaching and Detaching SR-IOV ports in nova

You are unable to attach or detach SR-IOV ports in nova in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 and later. Nova logs report No conversion for VIF type hw_veb yet.

You cannot attach or detach SR-IOV ports to an instance that has already been created. SR-IOV ports need to be attached at instance creation.

The following example shows an attempt to attach interfaces after an instance boot:

RHEL_INSTANCE_COUNT=1
NETID=$(neutron net-list | grep provider1 | awk '{print $2}')
for i in `seq 1 $RHEL_INSTANCE_COUNT`;do
#  nova floating-ip-create provider1
  portid1=`neutron port-create sriov1 --name sriov1 --binding:vnic-type direct  | awk '$2 == "id" {print $(NF-1)}'`
  portid2=`neutron port-create sriov2 --name sriov2 --binding:vnic-type direct  | awk '$2 == "id" {print $(NF-1)}'`
  openstack server create --flavor m1.small  --image rhel --nic net-id=$NETID --key-name id_rsa   sriov_vm${i}
  serverid=`openstack server list | grep sriov_vm${i} | awk '{print $2}'`
  status="NONE"
  while [ "$status" != "ACTIVE" ]; do
    echo "Server $serverid not active ($status)" ; sleep 5 ;
    status=`openstack server show $serverid | grep -i status | awk '{print $4}'`
  done
  nova interface-attach --port-id $portid1 $serverid
  nova interface-attach --port-id $portid2 $serverid
done

This fails with the following error:

ERROR (ClientException): Unexpected API Error. Please report this at http://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/ and attach the Nova API log if possible.
<type 'exceptions.KeyError'> (HTTP 500) (Request-ID: req-36b544f4-91a6-442e-a30d-6148220d1449)

The correct method is to spawn an instance directly with SR-IOV ports:

RHEL_INSTANCE_COUNT=1
NETID=$(neutron net-list | grep provider1 | awk '{print $2}')
for i in `seq 1 $RHEL_INSTANCE_COUNT`;do
#  nova floating-ip-create provider1
  portid1=`neutron port-create sriov1 --name sriov1 --binding:vnic-type direct  | awk '$2 == "id" {print $(NF-1)}'`
  portid2=`neutron port-create sriov2 --name sriov2 --binding:vnic-type direct  | awk '$2 == "id" {print $(NF-1)}'`
  openstack server create --flavor m1.small  --image rhel --nic net-id=$NETID --nic port-id=$portid1 --nic port-id=$portid2 --key-name id_rsa   sriov_vm${i}
done