ScaleIO integration with OpenStack

I have recently tested ScaleIO 2.0 functionality with Openstack Cloud (Mitaka release) and would like to share it here.

Rather than describing detailed steps to install ScaleIO and OpenStack, as there are many references/documents available, I am describing the configuration and storage operations in this post.

Benefits: One can provision ScaleIO block volumes to OpenStack-managed VMs with Openstack UI or Cinder commands without learning native ScaleIO interface.

ScaleIO (Software defined, scale-out storage)

Downloaded the ScaleIO 2.0 software for Linux from ScaleIO Software Defined Block Storage | EMC. Detailed instructions on setting up ScaleIO Cluster is included in the documentation provided with download package. Here is my setup

• 3x Node Cluster consisting one Master MDM, one Slave MDM and one TieBreaker
• All three contain SDS and 1x 100GB disk from each SDS participate in 'default' storage pool under 'default' protection domain
• ScaleIO Gateway Server and GUI are running on a separate host in my environment.

Have also verified that the REST gateway is working fine which is included in the Gateway Server for ScaleIO.

With this we have a working setup of ScaleIO Cluster.

OpenStack (Open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as an IaaS)

I have setup an OpenStack IaaS cloud. Used single node (allinone) RDO Mitaka running on CentOS 7 Linux server.

Details of the same can be found at https://www.rdoproject.org.

Created a Project 'Tenant01' and User 'User01' as a Tenant User. An instance 'Nova01' is created wihtout any Cinder volumes.

SDC is installed on the OpenStack Node (well.. all in one Node in my case) while ScaleIO drivers are already built-in from Liberty release.

Integration

Here is the typical integration diagram (from Liberty release though)

Edit the Cinder configuration file located /etc/cinder/cinder.conf to enable ScaleIO backend storage instead of default LVM

Restart Cinder Volume service.

Verify the volume logs from /var/log/cinder/volume.log file that drivers are successfully initialized.

Now let us test some of the operations related to Cinder volumes

• Create a Volume

Create an empty volume to be attached to existing Nova instance

You can see the volume logs showing ScaleIo volume is created

      And verify the same from ScaleIO CLI

• Attach the Volume to an Instance

Let us attach the volume created above to the existing instance 'Nova01'

Once the volume is attached, it can be detected inside the VM as any other disk.

• Extend a Volume

Current limitation on OpenStack Cinder is that volume must be detached before it can be extended. Here are the steps via CLI

Once attached back after extension, new size can be detected inside the VM

• Create, Mount/Verify (or restore required files) and Delete a snapshot

Let us create a partition, filesystem and mount the volume in the VM and write some test data to it

Create a snapshot of the volume

The snapshot created can be verified from ScaleIo CLI too

Let us delete one of the files that was created earlier

Now we have a situation where production data is missing or accidentally deleted. Let us restore the volume from the snapshot that we took

Attach the volume to the VM instance, mount it and restore the required data

 

• Detach and Delete a Volume

This is self explanatory

• Copy a Bootable Image to a Volume

Cinder volume can also be used as Bootable device by storing an Image on it. Let us create a new Volume from the Image source

This will copy the bootable image on the newly created volume

Which can be used to launch an instance as shown below

These are some of the basic tasks required by cloud users for daily operations.

Hope this is useful.