Description of problem: A customer wants to use some VMware ESXi VMs to install RHEL OSP controllers. The deployment has to be managed by RHEL OSP-d. The installation of RHEL OSP was tested with Ironic fake_pxe driver and worked well but we needed to reboot manually the ESXi instances during the deployment. Expected results: There is no Ironic driver to manage the power of ESXi threw vCenter API. A patch has been developed to manage the power of nodes with a SSH driver to the ESXi hosts: https://mojo.redhat.com/docs/DOC-1034793 For some users it's not possible to enable SSH on ESXi host because of security reasons, this SSH solution is not applicable for this customer. We need to develop a vCenter driver for Ironic. Additional info: Most drivers in Ironic does use pyton-proliantutils (for ilo) python-dracclient (for drac), we can use perhaps this type of librairies for vCenter: https://code.google.com/p/pysphere/wiki/GettingStarted https://github.com/vmware/pyvmomi
Does libvirt work with VMware ESXi? We have a proposal upstream to replace SSH driver with a libvirt driver to address SSH problems (e.g. better support Windows). Here is the spec: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/254421/
Answering my own question: I've found http://libvirt.org/drvesx.html "The libvirt VMware ESX driver can manage VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5/4.x/5.x and VMware GSX 2.0, also called VMware Server 2.0, and possibly later versions. Since 0.8.3 the driver can also connect to a VMware vCenter 2.5/4.x/5.x (VPX)." Is your version included in the list? If so, we could probably try to land this libvirt driver.. Please take a look at the Ironic spec (link in the previous comment).
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