The OpenStack Block Storage service provides block storage devices to guest instances. The method in which the storage is provisioned and consumed is determined by the Block Storage driver, or drivers in the case of a multi-backend configuration. There are a variety of drivers that are available: NAS/SAN, NFS, iSCSI, Ceph, and more. The Block Storage API and scheduler services typically run on the controller nodes. Depending upon the drivers used, the volume service can run on controllers, compute nodes, or standalone storage nodes. For more information, see the Configuration Reference. This chapter omits the backup manager because it depends on the Object Storage service.

Your OpenStack environment now includes Block Storage. You can launch an instance or add more services to your environment in the following chapters.