[Rdo-list] Packstack Icehouse changes

[Stefan Apostoaie]

Hello,

I was working on integrating a neutron plugin in Packstack and 
successfully done so for the Packstack havana.
I then tried porting the changes into Packstack for icehouse and noticed 
some changes that limit my options:
1. We need to run the metadata agents on all the compute nodes so we 
previously used the CONFIG_NEUTRON_METADATA_HOSTS option to specify 
this. In the latest version this was deprecated and replaced by 
CONFIG_NETWORK_HOSTS so the metadata agent will only be installed on the 
network node.
2. The CONFIG_CONTROLLER_HOST replaces several other options including 
CONFIG_HORIZON_HOST. In our setup we need to run horizon on the public 
network and the other services on the private network. The missing 
CONFIG_HORIZON_HOST means that the dashboard will only be available on 
our private network and we need to manually update the horizon and httpd 
config files.
3. The CONFIG_NOVA_VNCPROXY_HOST was also replaced by 
CONFIG_CONTROLLER_HOST so the VM console doesn't work outside our 
private network.
4. An issue that I've encountered when running packstack was a mysql 
puppet error "service mysqld start failed: my_default_config doesn't 
take the --mysqld parameter". The mysqld service started when I tried 
from the command line and after that Packstack worked. Not sure it's 
related to Packstack or some mysql server issue on our machines.
The servers we use have CentOS 6.5 installed.

I know that having only three types of hosts (CONTROLLER, NETWORK, and 
COMPUTE) simplifies things when installing basic Openstack 
configurations (with the ml2, linux bridge, or ovs plugin), but for us 
it becomes a lot more complicated to make Packstack do what we need. I 
believe that these changes affect Packstacks' flexibility. Now we cannot 
install horizon, cinder, swift, or keystone on a different host because 
they are tied to the CONFIG_CONTROLLER_HOST option.

Is there a way to override the CONFIG_CONTROLLER_HOST, 
CONFIG_NETWORK_HOSTS, and CONFIG_COMPUTE_HOSTS?
Can packstack havana be used to install Openstack icehouse by 
configuring yum to use the icehouse rdo repository?

Regards,
Stefan A