nexenta powered by apache cloudstack from iliyas shirol

Iliyas Shirol | BigData/Cloud Evangelist

Nexenta Powered

CloudStack Storage

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# FOSS Evangelist Since 2004

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# And yeah, I love to be on Cloud

Nexenta Powered CloudStack Storage

Agenda

• CloudStack Infrastructure

• Inside NexentaStor

• NexentaStor Storage Concepts

• Nexenta as CloudStack Storage


CloudStack Infrastructure


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


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


Inside NexentaStor


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


What is NexentaStor ?


Open Source and NexentaStor


NexentaStor

• Universal storage appliance software.

• Extensible plugin architecture

• Open APIs • Perl

• Python

• Ruby

• C

• REST

• Plugin Marketplace


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


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


NexentaStor Storage Appliance

NexentaStor Management


NMV


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.


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


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


**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


NexentaStor Storage

Concepts


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


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


Volumes and vdevs


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


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


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

Viewing a Volume via NMV


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

Folders and zvols


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


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 recordsize=8K size=100GB

zvol B recordsize=64K size=80GB

NexentaStor as

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


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 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 Object Storage (NOST)


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/


Q&A

Iliyas Shirol

BigData/Cloud Evangelist

[email protected]

M 990.297.7800

nexenta powered by apache cloudstack from iliyas shirol

Technology

storage settings

cluster shared storage

appliance management

dataon storage manager

volumes volumes

volume volumes

disk volumes

management network