In the previous post, we have installed Cinder and described its high level architecture. Today, we will look at a few uses cases (creating and attaching volumes) in detail, go through the code and see how Cinder interacts with external technologies like iSCSI and LVM. Creating a volume Let us first try to understand what … Continue reading OpenStack Cinder – creating and using volumes
Having looked at the foundations of the storage technology that Cinder uses in the previous posts, we are now ready to explore the basic architecture of Cinder and install Cinder in our playground. Cinder architecture Essentially, Cinder consists of three main components which are running as independent processes and typically on different nodes. First, there … Continue reading OpenStack Cinder – architecture and installation
When you want to build a volume service for a cloud platform, you need to find a way to quickly create and remove block devices on your compute nodes. We could of course use loopback devices for this, but this is slow, as every operation goes through the file system. A logical volume manager might … Continue reading OpenStack Cinder foundations – building logical volumes and snapshots with LVM
For a recent project using Ansible to define and run KVM virtual machines, I had to debug an issue with cloud-init. This was a trigger for me to do a bit of research on how cloud-init operates, and I decided to share my findings in this post. Note that this post is not an instruction … Continue reading Understanding cloud-init
To understand Cinder, the block device component of OpenStack, you will need to be familiar with some terms that originate from the world of data center networks like SCSI, SAN, LUN and so forth. In this post, we will take a short look at these topics to be prepared for our upcoming installation and configuration … Continue reading OpenStack Cinder foundations – storage networks, iSCSI, LUNs and all that
