NexentaStor Appliance is NAS/SAN software platform designed for building reliable and fast network storage arrays. The Nexenta Storage Appliance uses ZFS as a disk management system. NexentaStor can serve as a storage node for the OpenStack and for the virtual servers through iSCSI and NFS protocols. With the NFS option, every Compute volume is represented by a directory designated to be its own file system in the ZFS file system. These file systems are exported using NFS. With either option some minimal setup is required to tell OpenStack which NexentaStor servers are being used, whether they are supporting iSCSI and/or NFS and how to access each of the servers. Typically the only operation required on the NexentaStor servers is to create the containing directory for the iSCSI or NFS exports. For NFS this containing directory must be explicitly exported via NFS. There is no software that must be installed on the NexentaStor servers; they are controlled using existing management plane interfaces.

The Nexenta iSCSI driver allows you to use NexentaStor appliance to store Compute volumes. Every Compute volume is represented by a single zvol in a predefined Nexenta namespace. For every new volume the driver creates a iSCSI target and iSCSI target group that are used to access it from compute hosts. The Nexenta iSCSI volume driver should work with all versions of NexentaStor. The NexentaStor appliance must be installed and configured according to the relevant Nexenta documentation. A pool and an enclosing namespace must be created for all iSCSI volumes to be accessed through the volume driver. This should be done as specified in the release specific NexentaStor documentation. The NexentaStor Appliance iSCSI driver is selected using the normal procedures for one or multiple back-end volume drivers. You must configure these items for each NexentaStor appliance that the iSCSI volume driver controls:

This table contains the options supported by the Nexenta iSCSI driver. To use Compute with the Nexenta iSCSI driver, first set the volume_driver: volume_driver=cinder.volume.drivers.nexenta.iscsi.NexentaISCSIDriver Then, set the nexenta_host parameter and other parameters from the table, if needed.

The Nexenta NFS driver allows you to use NexentaStor appliance to store Compute volumes via NFS. Every Compute volume is represented by a single NFS file within a shared directory. While the NFS protocols standardize file access for users, they do not standardize administrative actions such as taking snapshots or replicating file systems. The OpenStack Volume Drivers bring a common interface to these operations. The Nexenta NFS driver implements these standard actions using the ZFS management plane that already is deployed on NexentaStor appliances. The Nexenta NFS volume driver should work with all versions of NexentaStor. The NexentaStor appliance must be installed and configured according to the relevant Nexenta documentation. A single parent file system must be created for all virtual disk directories supported for OpenStack. This directory must be created and exported on each NexentaStor appliance. This should be done as specified in the release specific NexentaStor documentation.

To use Compute with the Nexenta NFS driver, first set the volume_driver: volume_driver = cinder.volume.drivers.nexenta.nfs.NexentaNfsDriver The following table contains the options supported by the Nexenta NFS driver. Add your list of Nexenta NFS servers to the file you specified with the nexenta_shares_config option. For example, if the value of this option was set to /etc/cinder/nfs_shares, then: # cat /etc/cinder/nfs_shares 192.168.1.200:/storage http://admin:nexenta@192.168.1.200:2000 192.168.1.201:/storage http://admin:nexenta@192.168.1.201:2000 192.168.1.202:/storage http://admin:nexenta@192.168.1.202:2000 Comments are allowed in this file. They begin with a #. Each line in this file represents a NFS share. The first part of the line is the NFS share URL, the second is the connection URL to the NexentaStor Appliance.