Block Storage and OpenStack Compute OpenStack provides two classes of block storage, "ephemeral" storage and persistent "volumes". Ephemeral storage exists only for the life of an instance, it will persist across reboots of the guest operating system but when the instance is deleted so is the associated storage. All instances have some ephemeral storage. Volumes are persistent virtualized block devices independent of any particular instance. Volumes may be attached to a single instance at a time, but may be detached or reattached to a different instance while retaining all data, much like a USB drive. Ephemeral Storage Ephemeral storage is associated with a single unique instance. Its size is defined by the flavor of the instance. Data on ephemeral storage ceases to exist when the instance it is associated with is terminated. Rebooting the VM or restarting the host server, however, will not destroy ephemeral data. In the typical use case an instance's root filesystem is stored on ephemeral storage. This is often an unpleasant surprise for people unfamiliar with the cloud model of computing. In addition to the ephemeral root volume all flavors except the smallest, m1.tiny, provide an additional ephemeral block device varying from 20G for the m1.small through 160G for the m1.xlarge by default - these sizes are configurable. This is presented as a raw block device with no partition table or filesystem. Cloud aware operating system images may discover, format, and mount this device. For example the cloud-init package included in Ubuntu's stock cloud images will format this space as an ext3 filesystem and mount it on /mnt. It is important to note this a feature of the guest operating system. OpenStack only provisions the raw storage. Volume Storage Volume storage is independent of any particular instance and is persistent. Volumes are user created and within quota and availability limits may be of any arbitrary size. When first created volumes are raw block devices with no partition table and no filesystem. They must be attached to an instance to be partitioned and/or formatted. Once this is done they may be used much like an external disk drive. Volumes may attached to only one instance at a time, but may be detached and reattached to either the same or different instances. It is possible to configure a volume so that it is bootable and provides a persistent virtual instance similar to traditional non-cloud based virtualization systems. In this use case the resulting instance may still have ephemeral storage depending on the flavor selected, but the root filesystem (and possibly others) will be on the persistent volume and thus state will be maintained even if the instance is shutdown. Details of this configuration are discussed in theOpenStack End User Guide. Volumes do not provide concurrent access from multiple instances. For that you need either a traditional network filesystem like NFS or CIFS or a cluster filesystem such as GlusterFS. These may be built within an OpenStack cluster or provisioned outside of it, but are not features provided by the OpenStack software. The OpenStack Block Storage service works via the interaction of a series of daemon processes named cinder-* that reside persistently on the host machine or machines. The binaries can all be run from a single node, or spread across multiple nodes. They can also be run on the same node as other OpenStack services. The current services available in OpenStack Block Storage are: cinder-api - The cinder-api service is a WSGI app that authenticates and routes requests throughout the Block Storage system. It supports the OpenStack API's only, although there is a translation that can be done via Nova's EC2 interface which calls in to the cinderclient. cinder-scheduler - The cinder-scheduler is responsible for scheduling/routing requests to the appropriate volume service. As of Grizzly; depending upon your configuration this may be simple round-robin scheduling to the running volume services, or it can be more sophisticated through the use of the Filter Scheduler. The Filter Scheduler is the default in Grizzly and enables filter on things like Capacity, Availability Zone, Volume Types and Capabilities as well as custom filters. cinder-volume - The cinder-volume service is responsible for managing Block Storage devices, specifically the back-end devices themselves. cinder-backup - The cinder-backup service provides a means to back up a Cinder Volume to OpenStack Object Store (SWIFT). Introduction to OpenStack Block Storage OpenStack Block Storage provides persistent High Performance Block Storage resources that can be consumed by OpenStack Compute instances. This includes secondary attached storage similar to Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS). In addition images can be written to a Block Storage device and specified for OpenStack Compute to use a bootable persistent instance. There are some differences from Amazon's EBS that one should be aware of. OpenStack Block Storage is not a shared storage solution like NFS, but currently is designed so that the device is attached and in use by a single instance at a time. Backend Storage Devices OpenStack Block Storage requires some form of back-end storage that the service is built on. The default implementation is to use LVM on a local Volume Group named "cinder-volumes". In addition to the base driver implementation, OpenStack Block Storage also provides the means to add support for other storage devices to be utilized such as external Raid Arrays or other Storage appliances. Users and Tenants (Projects) The OpenStack Block Storage system is designed to be used by many different cloud computing consumers or customers, basically tenants on a shared system, using role-based access assignments. Roles control the actions that a user is allowed to perform. In the default configuration, most actions do not require a particular role, but this is configurable by the system administrator editing the appropriate policy.json file that maintains the rules. A user's access to particular volumes is limited by tenant, but the username and password are assigned per user. Key pairs granting access to a volume are enabled per user, but quotas to control resource consumption across available hardware resources are per tenant. For tenants, quota controls are available to limit the: Number of volumes which may be created Number of snapshots which may be created Total number of Giga Bytes allowed per tenant (shared between snapshots and volumes) Volumes Snapshots and Backups This introduction provides a high level overview of the two basic resources offered by the OpenStack Block Storage service. The first is Volumes and the second is Snapshots which are derived from Volumes. Volumes Volumes are allocated block storage resources that can be attached to instances as secondary storage or they can be used as the root store to boot instances. Volumes are persistent R/W Block Storage devices most commonly attached to the compute node via iSCSI. Snapshots A Snapshot in OpenStack Block Storage is a read-only point in time copy of a Volume. The Snapshot can be created from a Volume that is currently in use (via the use of '--force True') or in an available state. The Snapshot can then be used to create a new volume via create from snapshot. Backups A Backup is an archived copy of a Volume currently stored in Object Storage (Swift). Managing Volumes Cinder is the OpenStack service that allows you to give extra block level storage to your OpenStack Compute instances. You may recognize this as a similar offering from Amazon EC2 known as Elastic Block Storage (EBS). The default Cinder implementation is an iSCSI solution that employs the use of Logical Volume Manager (LVM) for Linux. Note that a volume may only be attached to one instance at a time. This is not a ‘shared storage’ solution like a SAN of NFS on which multiple servers can attach to. It's also important to note that Cinder also includes a number of drivers to allow you to use a number of other vendor's back-end storage devices in addition to or instead of the base LVM implementation. Here is brief walk-through of a simple create/attach sequence, keep in mind this requires proper configuration of both OpenStack Compute via cinder.conf and OpenStack Block Storage via cinder.conf. The volume is created via cinder create; which creates an LV into the volume group (VG) "cinder-volumes" The volume is attached to an instance via nova volume-attach; which creates a unique iSCSI IQN that will be exposed to the compute node The compute node which run the concerned instance has now an active ISCSI session; and a new local storage (usually a /dev/sdX disk) libvirt uses that local storage as a storage for the instance; the instance get a new disk (usually a /dev/vdX disk) Block Storage Capabilities OpenStack provides persistent block level storage devices for use with OpenStack compute instances. The block storage system manages the creation, attaching and detaching of the block devices to servers. Block storage volumes are fully integrated into OpenStack Compute and the Dashboard allowing for cloud users to manage their own storage needs. In addition to using simple Linux server storage, it has unified storage support for numerous storage platforms including Ceph, NetApp, Nexenta, SolidFire, and Zadara. Block storage is appropriate for performance sensitive scenarios such as database storage, expandable file systems, or providing a server with access to raw block level storage. Snapshot management provides powerful functionality for backing up data stored on block storage volumes. Snapshots can be restored or used to create a new block storage volume.