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      Copyright 2014 Mirantis, Inc.
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Manila System Architecture
==========================

The Shared File Systems service is intended to be ran on one or more nodes.

Manila uses a sql-based central database that is shared by all manila services in the system.  The amount and depth of the data fits into a sql database quite well.  For small deployments this seems like an optimal solution.  For larger deployments, and especially if security is a concern, manila will be moving towards multiple data stores with some kind of aggregation system.

Components
----------

Below you will a brief explanation of the different components.

::

                                                     /- ( LDAP )
                                 [ Auth Manager ] ---
                                        |            \- ( DB )
                                        |
                                        |

                                        |
 [ Web Dashboard ]- manilaclient -[ manila-api ] -- < AMQP > -- [ manila-scheduler ] -- [ manila-share ] -- ( shared filesystem )
                                        |
                                        |
                                        |
                                        |
                                        |
                                     < REST >


* DB: sql database for data storage. Used by all components (LINKS NOT SHOWN)
* Web Dashboard: external component that talks to the api, implemented as a
  plugin to the OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) project, source
  is `here <https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/manila-ui>`_.
* :term:`manila-api`
* Auth Manager: component responsible for users/projects/and roles.  Can backend to DB or LDAP.  This is not a separate binary, but rather a python class that is used by most components in the system.
* :term:`manila-scheduler`
* :term:`manila-share`

Further Challenges
------------------

*   More efficient share/snapshot size calculation
*   Create a notion of "attached" shares with automation of mount operations
*   Allow admin-created share-servers and share-networks to be used by multiple tenants
*   Support creation of new subnets for share servers (to connect VLANs with VXLAN/GRE/etc)
*   Gateway mediated networking model with NFS-Ganesha
*   Add support for more backends