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Managing Openstack Block Storage with StackOps Portal

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OpenStack Block Storage (codename Cinder) is an infrastructure component to manage block storage integrated as volumes in an OpenStack Compute platform. Previously this feature were implemented with nova-volume. Hence, Cinder is a new project launched in the “F” Folsom release of Openstack and comes to replace the old nova-volume decoupling it from Nova component.

Cinder operations includes create, delete, attach and detach a volumes in its API REST, but also advanced features like snapshotting, image upload and others.

Multi back-end support

In an Infrastructure as a Service platform you might want to create volumes and group together depending on some predefined characteristics, Quality of Service or different behavior (i.e. It can be groups with expensive and quicker disks for high performant databases, or cheap and slower disk to store non structured data).

Cinder needs to know about all these types and can categorized its volumes in these groups. Each of these types needs a specific Volume Manager capable of handling the communication with the different Storage backends.Each back-end is spawned as children to cinder-volume process and belongs to a single processing queue. The Cinder Scheduler Filter decides where to send a volume depending on the volume type specified when the component is going to perform an operation on a volume.

Hence, in order to work with multi back-ends, a special configuration is required and the types must be defined in advance. When a cloud user creates a volume, the volume type must be passed as an argument. Multi backends has been supported since Folsom release, but only since Grizzly they are fully functional. So don’t try to use multi backends in Folsom, it won’t work.

Upload and Download images from Glance

A very nice feature implemented in the ‘G’ release was the upload of volumes as an image to the Image repository component (aka Glance). With Cinder it is possible to “backup” a volume uploading it into Glance as an image. Container and Disk formats of the new image can be configured too, making things easier for Cloud users.

Disk Manager in Portal Plugins using Cinder

In StackOps we have developed a plugin in StackOps Portal called Disk Manager able to manage volumes and types easily from a single component view. The different views supported in the plugin are:

  • Types: It is possible to check all the types predefined in the platform together with its ID, name and extra specifications.

Type-panel

  • Volumes:  It is possible to manage all the volumes with this plugin but there is a functionality to filter volumes depending on its type. By default all volumes are shown without considering types.

Volumes-panel

This plugin supports most of the cinder API actions:

  • Create a volume from scratch or from a snapshot, it is possible to create the volume with a volume type or/and selecting an image in it.
  • Delete both Volumes and Snapshots.
  • Take a snapshot of a volume.
  • Attach/Detach a volume from an instance, when attaching it is mandatory to choose which instance do you want to associate, an empty device from a drop box list or type it directly.
  • Upload an image, is the function explained above and communicates Cinder and Glance saving a volume as an image in the Glance repository.

Some of this actions directly depend on the status of the volumes, the plugin manages those situations and show/hide actions based on the role of the user and the current status of each volume.

The lastest version includes new functionality for Grizzly and Havana like Type’s panel or Upload to Image. For example, creating a new volume with a specified type can be done as follows:

CreateVolumeWithType

Also upload a volume as an image to Glance repository is possible with this form:

UploadToImage

What’s new in Havana?

Havana comes with some interesting new features, for example:

  • Transferring a volume from type ‘A’ to type ‘B’
  • Volume resize
  • Volume migration, transferring a volume from one tenant to another

 
Ignacio Barrio works as Frontend Software engineer at StackOps Development team. He is leading the development of the StackOps Portal Plugins around Nova and Cinder OpenStack components and custom StackOps services.  

The easiest way to enjoy the Disk Manager features of OpenStack™ Compute and Block Storage is with  StackOps 360, the Openstack-based cloud platform by Stackops. You can get the distro from here.  You only need to register to get an email with all the details to download and install.


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