nexenta powered by apache cloudstack from iliyas shirol

Iliyas Shirol | BigData/Cloud Evangelist

Nexenta Powered

CloudStack Storage

whoami

# FOSS Evangelist Since 2004

# Founder of LOAD (Linux On A Desktop) Project

# System Admin, DBA, and an Ethical Hacker

# And yeah, I love to be on Cloud

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Agenda

• CloudStack Infrastructure

• Inside NexentaStor

• NexentaStor Storage Concepts

• Nexenta as CloudStack Storage

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

CloudStack Infrastructure

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

CloudStack Infrastructure – Primary Storage

• Associated with a cluster

• Stores the disk volumes for all the VMs

running on hosts in a cluster

• Shared storage is normally

recommended

• NFS

• iSCSI

• Fibre Channel

• Use local storage

• Where high availability isn't needed

• Where greater disk I/O is needed

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

CloudStack Infrastructure – Secondary Storage

• Associated with a zone

• Stores:

• Templates - OS images used to

create VMs

• ISO Images - Images that can be

bootable or non-bootable

• Disk volume snapshots (saved copies

of VM data)

• Available to all hosts in the zone

• Must be NFS

• Or NFS + Swift

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Inside NexentaStor

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

About Nexenta

• ZFS filesystem, based on OpenSolaris and Debian

• Linux open source code bases (Moving to illumos)

• Software-only

• Platform, plugins, and adapters

• Compelling advantages over proprietary filesystems

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

What is NexentaStor ?

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Open Source and NexentaStor

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

NexentaStor

• Universal storage appliance software.

• Extensible plugin architecture

• Open APIs • Perl

• Python

• Ruby

• C

• REST

• Plugin Marketplace

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

NexentaStor Storage Appliance

• Simplicity of installation & management

• Optimized base configuration for:

• Easily reproduced configuration on a massive scale

• Generalized storage skill set required to maintain extensive infrastructure

• Little or no need for modification to achieve high performance

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

The NexentaStor appliance incorporates three software platforms to allow for full operation and management

• NMS – Nexenta Management Server. The primary server software that is responsible for processing commands and gathering data for command outputs

• NMC – Nexenta Management Console. The interactive command line interface software which enables appliance management through any character based terminal connection

• NMV – Nexenta Management Viewer. The browser based graphical interface which allows graphical administration of appliances

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

NexentaStor Storage Appliance

NexentaStor Management

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

NMV

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

NexentaStor CDROM Installation • CDROM install is extremely easy

• If multiple disks are selected for syspool, they will automatically be mirrored

• After the software is installed, remove the CDROM before booting the new NexentaStor O/S

• Enter the commercial or trial license key

• Reconfigure the management network with DHCP or static IP (preferred)

• The remainder of the installation and configuration can be done via NMV and NMC.

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Configuration via Wizard-1

Wizard 1 is used for

configuring basic appliance

settings like:

• Hostname

• Domain name

• NTP Server

• root (Super user for NMC) and

admin (Super user for NMV)

passwords

• SMTP settings

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Configuration via Wizard-2

Wizard 2 is used for network

and storage settings like:

• Configuring NIC ports, Link

Aggregations, and IPMP groups

• Configuring iSCSI initiator and

target

• Viewing/scanning for disk drives

• Creating volumes

• Folders

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

**All settings in Wizard 1 and 2 can also be configured through NMV

Popular NMV Plugins

Nexenta

• SCSItarget: COMSTAR Management Interface

• Auto-sync: Manages ZFS send/receive service

• Auto-tier: Manages rsync service

• HA-Cluster: 2-node HA Cluster

• VMDC: Virtual Machine Management support

Others

• DataOn Storage Manager

• ntop: network top

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

NexentaStor Storage

Concepts

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

volumes

The NexentaStor appliance groups disk space into portable objects called volumes

• Volumes can be imported to an appliance, enabling access to the data in the volume

• Volumes can be exported from an appliance, preventing access to the data in the volume

• In an HA-Cluster configuration, volumes are exported from one cluster node and imported on the other cluster node during a Cluster Volume failover

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

vdevs

The most critical element to the performance of a volume is the configuration of its underlying vdevs

• A higher number of vdevs allows for lower I/O latency but lower capacity of the volume

• A lower number of vdevs allows for greater capacity but higher overall I/O (especially read) latency

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Volumes and vdevs

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

vdev-1 vdev-2 vdev-3 vdev-4 vdev-5 vdev-6

volume

• A volume is a logical container of disk space constructed from underlying vdevs

• vdevs can be thought of as virtual RAID disks or LUNs, constructed from physical disks

• The volume distributes writes across the vdevs

Volumes and vdevs

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

volume volume

vdev-1 vdev-2 vdev-3 vdev-4 vdev-5 vdev-6

• Mirrored vdevs result in the maximum number of vdevs for a given number of disks

which allows for maximum simultaneous operations and the lowest read/write latency

• Mirrored vdevs also have a relatively low data redundancy since the loss of two disks in the same vdev will result in the loss of all data in the entire volume

vdev-1

Viewing a Volume via NMC

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

NMC readily shows critical details about the configuration and condition of a volume

Viewing a Volume via NMV

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

• NMV shows the same information about of a volume, plus offers maintenance options on the same screen

Folders and zvols

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

volume

Folder A Currently

100GB

Folder A Currently

90GB

Folder A Currently

80GB

• Folders are filesystem formatted datasets that automatically grow and shrink as data is added and removed

• Folders support variable recordsize which optimizes storage space and I/O for very small files while also allowing for higher throughput for larger files. The maximum recordsize of 128KB should be maintained unless performance testing dictates otherwise

• A single folder can be shared via CIFS and NFS at the same time (Mixed mode case sensitivity is required)

Folders and zvols

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

volume

• A zvol is an unformatted dataset of a fixed recordsize and capacity • Once shared to a client, the zvol operates like a standard disk

drive with volatile onboard cache • If the NexentaStor crashes before a client sends a cache flush

command for a shared zvol, all data that is in NexentaStor memory waiting to be written to the volume’s disks will be lost

• “Writeback Cache” should be turned off on shared zvols to ensure data is written synchronously to persistent storage

• A zvol can optionally be thin provisioned • Allows more data space to be shared than is actually available

zvol A record- size=8K size=100GB

zvol B record- size=64K size=80GB

NexentaStor as

CloudStack Storage

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Provisioning CloudStack Primary

Storage

• Expose a volume using NFS/iSCSI as per the cluster requirement

• Add the respective volume as a ‘Primary Storage’ from the CloudStack portal

• CloudStack provisioning with NexentaStor can now be automated using Enterprise Chef™ cookbooks, using the Knife API plug-ins

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Provisioning CloudStack Secondary

Storage (Object Storage)

• Today

• CloudStack does not offer native object storage

• Provisioned by OpenStack Swift object storage

• 2014

• NOST will be a superior option for providing object storage to a CloudStack installation.

• Will get higher performance and greater scalability.

• NOST will operate under a common management framework with NexentaStor to simplify storage management operations

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Nexenta Object Storage (NOST)

• Unlimited Object Size

• No effective limits on SCALE

• Full S3 compatibility, including S3 ACLs

• Distributed Deduplication

• Effectively Local Storage

• Local File System (LFS) Isolation – directly on ZFS

• Optimized network replication using ZFS mirroring.

• Unlimited distributed versioning.

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Nexenta Object Storage (NOST)

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Get Involved Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/CloudStack-Bangalore-Group/

Web: http://cloudstack.apache.org/

Mailing Lists: cloudstack.apache.org/mailing-lists.html

IRC: irc.freenode.net: 6667 #cloudstack

Twitter: @cloudstack

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups/CloudStack-Users-Group-3144859

If it didn’t happen on the mailing list, it didn’t happen.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cloudstack/

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Q&A

Iliyas Shirol

BigData/Cloud Evangelist

iliyas.shirol@inmobi.com

M 990.297.7800