Introduction

Purpose

Currently if an admin wants to update the hosts connected to CloudStack, he needs to search the released updates from a given source URL and check the updates as per the applicable XenServer version. Then admin needs to compare them with the already applied patches to find out the available updates. To reduce this effort we are adding this feature to CloudStack.

This feature will list the available patches/hotfixes for hypervisors managed by CloudStack. CloudStack admin will be able to see the available updates on CloudStack UI. This is a functional specification of feature "XS updates notification" which has Jira ID _CLOUDSTACK-192

References

Feature Specifications

  • Requirements
    • Surface up the list of all available updates applicable to XenServers hosts being managed by CloudStack and display them by means of APIs or on CloudStack UI dashboard so that admin can have the list of available updates and take appropriate action to install them manually.
  • Non-requirements
    • CloudStack will only list the applicable updates and it is not responsible for applying the updates on the host.
  • Configuration
    • There are three global configuration parameters:
      • xen.update.url - URL to get latest Xenserver Updates. Default value for this is http://updates.xensource.com/XenServer/updates.xml;
      • update.check.interval (in minutes) - How frequently should CloudStack check for Xenserver Updates. By default CloudStack will check for new updates once a week.
      • host.updates.enable - To enable or disable the functionality based on admin demand.
  • User permission
    • Root-Admin would have privilege to list the available updates.

Use Cases

  • Admin wants to check if there are any updates available for a host. She navigates to Infrastructure -> Hosts -> Updates in CloudStack UI. If there are any updates available that have not been applied to the host, are listed there along with the link for downloading the updates.

Architecture and Design description

This hostUpdates feature will come as a separate plugin which will enumerate all the hosts managed by CloudStack to provide the udpates. This will use this PluggableService to add the HostUpdate feature APIs into CloudStack* and the *HostUpdatesManager will be responsible for thread scheduling. This functionality will be contained in an independent jar file.

Search for Host Updates

The initial time to start thread after the management server comes up is set to 10 minutes and after regular intervals(default is one week), update.check.interval, management server will look for all available updates for a Hypervisior. For Xenserver, it'll downloads the latest update information from http://updates.xensource.com/XenServer/updates.xml. The location is configurable through xen.update.url in global configuration.

  • Search the released patches for applicable XenServer version.
  • Fetch the information about the already applied patches from the agent.
  • Compare the list of available patches with the list of already applied patches.
  • Prepare a list of patches that are not yet applied.
  • Fill/update the patch details into host_updates table.
  • Make a corresponding entry into host_updates_ref table.

Admin can change the time interval to check the updates by changing the value of update.check.interval global config parameter(by default interval is set to check for updates once a week).

List Host Updates

DB Schema changes

New tables

  • host_updates (id, uuid, label, description, label, url, timestamp) :  This table contains the details about the patches for different XenServers versions.

    Field

    Type

    NULL

    Key

    Default

    Extra

    id

    bigint(20) unsigned

    NO

    PRI

    NULL

    auto_increment

    uuid

    varchar(40)

    NO

     

    NULL

     

    description

    varchar(999)

    YES

     

    NULL

     

    label

    varchar(40)

    YES

     

    NULL

     

    timestamp

    timestamp

    YES

     

    NULL

     

    url

    varchar(999)

    YES

     

    NULL

     
  • host_updates_ref (id, host_id,patch_id, update_applied) : This table maps the hosts from host table with the applicable patches from host_updates table.

    Field

    Type

    NULL

    Key

    Default

    Extra

    id

    bigint(20) unsigned

    NO

    PRI

    NULL

    auto_increment

    host_id

    bigint(20) unsigned

    NO

    MUL

    NULL

     

    patch_id

    bigint(20) unsigned

    NO

     

    NULL

     

    update_applied

    tinyint(1)

    NO

     

    0

     

New client APIs

ApiName

Request parameters

Response parameters

Available to regular user

listHostUpdates

  • id
  • hostid (required)
  • applied
  • id
  • update Label
  • description
  • update URL
  • timestamp
  • isApplied

No

In the above mentioned API, only hostid is required parameter and the other parameters (id and applied) are optional. If admin wants to list all the patches that are not yet applied to a host, set the applied parameter as false and if admin wants to list the applied ones, set the applied parameter as true. If applied parameter is not passed with the API, it will return the list of all applied and not applied patches. To get the details about the single patch, admin need to pass the id (uuid)* *of the patch.

ApiName

Request parameters

Response parameters

Available to regular user

listHostsWithPendingUpdates

  • patchid
  • hostId
  • host name

No

This API will return a list of hosts which have pending updates. Admin can also search hosts with pending updates by passing a parameter patchid, it will return a list of hosts which do not have this patch applied.

New classes for client APIs

  • ListHostUpdatesCmd.java
  • HostUpdatesResponse.java
  • ListHostsWithPendingUpdatesCmd.java
  • HostsWithPendingUpdatesResponse.java

New objects interfaces:

  • HostUpdatesRef.java
  • HostUpdatesService.java

New VO and Dao objects:

  • HostUpdatesDao.java
  • HostUpdatesDaoImpl.java
  • HostUpdatesVO.java
  • HostUpdatesRefDao.java
  • HostUpdatesRefDaoImpl.java
  • HostUpdatesRefVO.java

New managers interfaces and implementation:

  • HostUpdatesManager.java
  • HostUpdatesManagerImpl.java

Changes to Existing Files:

  • Add a new method in CitrixResourceBase.java to get the information about the applied patches to a host using *XAPI *calls.
  • Add a new method in ResourceManagerImpl.java* *to get a list of hosts which are up and enabled by hypervisor type.
  • Add a new component HostUpdatesManager.

New Agent APIs:

  • hostUpdatesCommand.java
  • hostUpdatesAnswer.java

 These agent APIs will not be present in hostUpdates plugin, these APIs will come the api project under com.cloud.agent.api packages.

Logging and Debugging

All logs will go to management-server.log

Current limitations

  • Initial implementation will be there only for Xenserver hypervisor. Going forward, this feature can be made available for other hypervisors.

UI flow

This is the mockup UI, will modify it as per the suggestions.

We are planning to display the XS alert notifications under “Alerts”, where admin can see the Update Alerts.

Because of this the “Updates Alerts” will get displayed on Dashboard too.

Also, admin can navigate to Events tab -> Host Updates (dropdown option), to get the list of all the hosts which have pending updates.

By clicking on any listed host, Admin can see the list of all the applicable updates that needs to be applied.

Admin can also see the udpates in “Update” tab under the Host detailView: