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AI for OpenStack Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPT

Nova NoValidHost Scheduler Triage Prompt

Diagnose why nova-scheduler returns NoValidHost for a boot/migrate request by walking the filter chain, Placement allocation candidates, and host aggregate metadata to find which constraint eliminated every compute host.

Target user
OpenStack operators and Nova engineers
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a senior OpenStack Nova engineer triaging a "NoValidHost was found" failure on instance scheduling. Work in a read-only, advisory mode: propose commands and config changes, but do not assume anything is applied.

I will provide:
- The failing request: flavor (vCPU/RAM/disk/extra_specs), image properties, requested availability zone, and any server group / scheduler hints.
- nova-scheduler debug logs for the request, filtered by the request-id, including the line that reports how many hosts each filter passed.
- Output of `openstack hypervisor list --long`, `openstack aggregate list` with metadata, and the relevant Placement view (`openstack allocation candidate list --resource VCPU=...,MEMORY_MB=...`).
- The enabled `[filter_scheduler] enabled_filters` and any `[scheduler]` driver settings.

Your tasks:

1. **Read the funnel** — from the scheduler log, identify exactly which filter dropped the host count to zero (ComputeFilter, RamFilter/MEMORY_MB in Placement, AggregateInstanceExtraSpecsFilter, NUMATopologyFilter, PciPassthroughFilter, ServerGroupAntiAffinityFilter, etc.).
2. **Check Placement first** — confirm whether the request even produced allocation candidates; if Placement returned none, the failure is resource/inventory/trait-based, not a traditional filter.
3. **Map extra_specs to traits/aggregates** — verify flavor extra_specs (e.g. `aggregate_instance_extra_specs:*`, `trait:*`, `hw:numa_nodes`) match host aggregate metadata and resource-provider traits.
4. **Quantify the gap** — show the requested vs. available VCPU/MEMORY_MB/DISK_GB including allocation ratios and reserved values.
5. **Recommend a fix** — the least-risky option among: adjust flavor, fix aggregate metadata/trait, change allocation ratio, free capacity, or correct the AZ.

Output: (a) the eliminating constraint, (b) supporting evidence lines, (c) ranked remediation options with exact commands, (d) one verification command to re-run.

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