How to use a Red Hat Storage volume as Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Cinder block storage back end

by Rudi Kastl, curriculum manager, Red Hat

By default, the packstack installer uses either a volume group named cinder-volumes or a loopback device as back end for the Cinder block storage service. For professional purposes, this is not enough; the usual requirement is to have a redundant storage back end. If you have an existing Red Hat Storage service, you might want to use one of the GlusterFS volumes as back end for the block devices your virtual machines use in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform cloud.

Before starting the configuration, you must remove all existing Cinder volumes, or you will run into problems. To figure out if there are any existing volumes with your current Cinder setup issue:

source /root/keystonerc_admin
cinder list

If there are any volumes listed, delete them with:

cinder delete volumename

Now that you have a cleaned-up Cinder setup, you can configure the back end to exclusively use the Red Hat Storage GlusterFS volume(s).

Start off by installing the GlusterFS-fuse package on the Cinder host, available in the Red Hat Storage Native Client repository from Red Hat Network.

yum -y install GlusterFS-fuse

After installation of the native GlusterFS client, adjust the Cinder configuration file for your desired Red Hat Storage back end. Consider backing up the cinder.conf configuration file before actually applying the configuration change.

openstack-config --set /etc/cinder/cinder.conf DEFAULT volume_driver cinder.volume.drivers.glusterfs.GlusterfsDriver
openstack-config --set /etc/cinder/cinder.conf DEFAULT glusterfs_shares_config /etc/cinder/shares.conf

After adjusting the cinder.conf configuration file, create the /etc/cinder/shares.conf file listing all the GlusterFS volumes you want to use as a back end. The shares.conf file lists the GlusterFS volumes with 1 volume per line:

storage.myserver.com:myvolume1 anotherhost.myrhs.com:volume2

Now just restart the affected Cinder services.

for svc in api scheduler volume; do service openstack-cinder-${svc} restart; done

Look at the output of mount to see if your GlusterFS volumes have been mounted successfully by the Cinder service.

In the all-new Red Hat OpenStack Administration (CL210) course, system administrators will learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Cinder block storage service.

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