# Manage quotas

Note

This section provides deployment information about the quota feature. For end-user information about quotas, including information about the type of quotas available, refer to the user guide.

To prevent system capacities from being exhausted without notification, you can set up quotas. Quotas are operational limits. For example, the number of gigabytes allowed for each project can be controlled so that cloud resources are optimized. Quotas can be enforced at both the project and the project-user level.

Starting in the 16.0.0 Pike release, the quota calculation system in nova was overhauled and the old reserve/commit/rollback flow was changed to count resource usage at the point of whatever operation is being performed, such as creating or resizing a server. A check will be performed by counting current usage for the relevant resource and then, if `quota.recheck_quota` is True, another check will be performed to ensure the initial check is still valid.

By default resource usage is counted using the API and cell databases but nova can be configured to count some resource usage without using the cell databases. See Quota usage from placement for details.

Using the command-line interface, you can manage quotas for nova, along with cinder and neutron. You would typically change default values because, for example, a project requires more than ten volumes or 1 TB on a compute node.

## Checking quota

When calculating limits for a given resource and project, the following checks are made in order:

1. Project-specific limits

   Depending on the resource, is there a project-specific limit on the resource in either the `quotas` or `project_user_quotas` tables in the database? If so, use that as the limit. You can create these resources using:

       $ openstack quota set --instances 5 <project>

2. Default limits

   Check to see if there is a hard limit for the given resource in the `quota_classes` table in the database for the `default` quota class. If so, use that as the limit. You can modify the default quota limit for a resource using:

       $ openstack quota set --instances 5 --class default

   Note

   Only the `default` class is supported by nova.

3. Config-driven limits

   If the above does not provide a resource limit, then rely on the configuration options in the `quota` config group for the default limits.

Note

The API sets the limit in the `quota_classes` table. Once a default limit is set via the default quota class, that takes precedence over any changes to that resource limit in the configuration options. In other words, once you’ve changed things via the API, you either have to keep those synchronized with the configuration values or remove the default limit from the database manually as there is no REST API for removing quota class values from the database.

## Quota usage from placement

Starting in the Train (20.0.0) release, it is possible to configure quota usage counting of cores and RAM from the placement service and instances from instance mappings in the API database instead of counting resources from cell databases. This makes quota usage counting resilient in the presence of down or poor-performing cells.

Quota usage counting from placement is opt-in via the :`quota.count_usage_from_placement` config option:

    [quota]
    count_usage_from_placement = True

There are some things to note when opting in to counting quota usage from placement:

- Counted usage will not be accurate in an environment where multiple Nova deployments are sharing a placement deployment because currently placement has no way of partitioning resource providers between different Nova deployments. Operators who are running multiple Nova deployments that share a placement deployment should not set the `quota.count_usage_from_placement` configuration option to `True`.

- Behavior will be different for resizes. During a resize, resource allocations are held on both the source and destination (even on the same host, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1790204) until the resize is confirmed or reverted. Quota usage will be inflated for servers in this state and operators should weigh the advantages and disadvantages before enabling `quota.count_usage_from_placement`.

- The `populate_queued_for_delete` and `populate_user_id` online data migrations must be completed before usage can be counted from placement. Until the data migration is complete, the system will fall back to legacy quota usage counting from cell databases depending on the result of an EXISTS database query during each quota check, if `quota.count_usage_from_placement` is set to `True`. Operators who want to avoid the performance hit from the EXISTS queries should wait to set the `quota.count_usage_from_placement` configuration option to `True` until after they have completed their online data migrations via `nova-manage db online_data_migrations`.

- Behavior will be different for unscheduled servers in `ERROR` state. A server in `ERROR` state that has never been scheduled to a compute host will not have placement allocations, so it will not consume quota usage for cores and ram.

- Behavior will be different for servers in `SHELVED_OFFLOADED` state. A server in `SHELVED_OFFLOADED` state will not have placement allocations, so it will not consume quota usage for cores and ram. Note that because of this, it will be possible for a request to unshelve a server to be rejected if the user does not have enough quota available to support the cores and ram needed by the server to be unshelved.

## Known issues

If not counting quota usage from placement it is possible for down or poor-performing cells to impact quota calculations. See the cells documentation for details.

## Future plans

### Hierarchical quotas

There has long been a desire to support hierarchical or nested quotas leveraging support in the identity service for hierarchical projects. See the unified limits spec for details.

## Configuration

### View and update default quota values

To list all default quotas for a project, run:

    $ openstack quota show --default

Note

This lists default quotas for all services and not just nova.

To update a default value for a new project, run:

    $ openstack quota set --class --instances 15 default

### View and update quota values for a project or class

To list quotas for a project, run:

    $ openstack quota show PROJECT

Note

This lists project quotas for all services and not just nova.

To update quotas for a project, run:

    $ openstack quota set --QUOTA QUOTA_VALUE PROJECT

To update quotas for a class, run:

    $ openstack quota set --class --QUOTA QUOTA_VALUE CLASS

Note

Only the `default` class is supported by nova.

For example:

    $ openstack quota set --instances 12 my-project
    $ openstack quota show my-project
    +----------------------+----------------------------------+
    | Field                | Value                            |
    +----------------------+----------------------------------+
    | backup-gigabytes     | 1000                             |
    | backups              | 10                               |
    | cores                | 32                               |
    | fixed-ips            | -1                               |
    | floating-ips         | 10                               |
    | gigabytes            | 1000                             |
    | health_monitors      | None                             |
    | injected-file-size   | 10240                            |
    | injected-files       | 5                                |
    | injected-path-size   | 255                              |
    | instances            | 12                               |
    | key-pairs            | 100                              |
    | l7_policies          | None                             |
    | listeners            | None                             |
    | load_balancers       | None                             |
    | location             | None                             |
    | name                 | None                             |
    | networks             | 20                               |
    | per-volume-gigabytes | -1                               |
    | pools                | None                             |
    | ports                | 60                               |
    | project              | c8156b55ec3b486193e73d2974196993 |
    | project_name         | project                          |
    | properties           | 128                              |
    | ram                  | 65536                            |
    | rbac_policies        | 10                               |
    | routers              | 10                               |
    | secgroup-rules       | 50                               |
    | secgroups            | 50                               |
    | server-group-members | 10                               |
    | server-groups        | 10                               |
    | snapshots            | 10                               |
    | subnet_pools         | -1                               |
    | subnets              | 20                               |
    | volumes              | 10                               |
    +----------------------+----------------------------------+

To view a list of options for the openstack quota show and openstack quota set commands, run:

    $ openstack quota show --help
    $ openstack quota set --help

### View and update quota values for a project user

Note

User-specific quotas are legacy and will be removed when migration to unified limits is complete. User-specific quotas were added as a way to provide two-level hierarchical quotas and this feature is already being offered in unified limits. For this reason, the below commands have not and will not be ported to openstackclient.

To show quotas for a specific project user, run:

    $ nova quota-show --user USER PROJECT

To update quotas for a specific project user, run:

    $ nova quota-update --user USER --QUOTA QUOTA_VALUE PROJECT

For example:

    $ projectUser=$(openstack user show -f value -c id USER)
    $ project=$(openstack project show -f value -c id PROJECT)

    $ nova quota-update --user $projectUser --instance 12 $project
    $ nova quota-show --user $projectUser --tenant $project
    +-----------------------------+-------+
    | Quota                       | Limit |
    +-----------------------------+-------+
    | instances                   | 12    |
    | cores                       | 20    |
    | ram                         | 51200 |
    | floating_ips                | 10    |
    | fixed_ips                   | -1    |
    | metadata_items              | 128   |
    | injected_files              | 5     |
    | injected_file_content_bytes | 10240 |
    | injected_file_path_bytes    | 255   |
    | key_pairs                   | 100   |
    | security_groups             | 10    |
    | security_group_rules        | 20    |
    | server_groups               | 10    |
    | server_group_members        | 10    |
    +-----------------------------+-------+

To view the quota usage for the current user, run:

    $ nova limits --tenant PROJECT

For example:

    $ nova limits --tenant my-project
    +------+-----+-------+--------+------+----------------+
    | Verb | URI | Value | Remain | Unit | Next_Available |
    +------+-----+-------+--------+------+----------------+
    +------+-----+-------+--------+------+----------------+

    +--------------------+------+-------+
    | Name               | Used | Max   |
    +--------------------+------+-------+
    | Cores              | 0    | 20    |
    | Instances          | 0    | 10    |
    | Keypairs           | -    | 100   |
    | Personality        | -    | 5     |
    | Personality Size   | -    | 10240 |
    | RAM                | 0    | 51200 |
    | Server Meta        | -    | 128   |
    | ServerGroupMembers | -    | 10    |
    | ServerGroups       | 0    | 10    |
    +--------------------+------+-------+

Note

The nova limits command generates an empty table as a result of the Compute API, which prints an empty list for backward compatibility purposes.

To view a list of options for the nova quota-show and nova quota-update commands, run:

    $ nova help quota-show
    $ nova help quota-update

this page last updated: 2026-06-10 20:07:09

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