NFS Persistent Storage Integration

Description

This feature is an NFS persistent storage plugin. Previously only iSCSI storage devices could be used to provide persistent storage in Abiquo. For more information about persistent storage in Abiquo see Storage

The main aim of this feature is to bypass the iSCSI LUN limit in ESXi. Customers using a persistent disk model with previous versions of Abiquo could not scale their offering because they could not sell more than 256 persistent system disks or volumes in an ESX cluster. This feature overcomes this limitation through a transparent integration with no changes to GUI screens, API calls or use cases. This feature also enables customers to use any storage device with NFS support for persistent storage, whereas previously managed storage devices could only be iSCSI devices.

NFS persistent storage is not available on Hyper-V

Summary of NFS persistent storage feature specification

The persistent storage feature has the following characteristics.

Persistent storage device of type "NFS"
The storage plugin imports NFS shares as pools
- All valid shares exported by the NFS server will be listed as pools
  - The Datacenter's NFS Repository is not listed
  - Abiquo does not control space across multiple shares
    - Add one NFS share per storage device
- You can now edit storage pools to set
  - Usable percent
  - Maximum volumes
Persistent disk files are created on the NFS shares
- Disks are in RAW format
- Disks will persist after they are detached from VMs
Hypervisors list the NFS shares as datastores
- Do not enable these NFS shares as Abiquo datastores to avoid mixing persistent and non-persistent disks
Plugin will create/delete/resize the volumes as hypervisor datastore disks

You can configure a storage allocation method for each storage tier in a datacenter.

Create an NFS storage device

To create an NFS storage device:

Go to Infrastructure → Private → select a datacenter → Storage
Click the + add button
For the Storage technology, select NFS. In the Management and Service fields, enter the IP address and port of the device.

You can add a storage device more than once using the same IP address if the same device uses more than one storage protocol

All valid NFS shares on the storage device will be listed as storage pools.
- The datacenter's NFS Repository (opt/vm_repository) will not be listed
- Abiquo does not control space across multiple shares
  - Best practice is to add ONE share per storage device
Select an NFS share (pool) and assign it to a tier

Edit a storage pool

You can now control the usable percentage of the storage pool and the maximum number of volumes that will be created in it.

Field	Description
Name	The name of the storage pool
Tier	The tier the storage pool belongs to
Usable Percent	The percentage of the pool that can be used. The default value is 100%. This is applied after Abiquo calculates the /wiki/spaces/ABI54/pages/310740457 for NetApp devices.
Max. volumes	The maximum number of volumes that can be created in this pool. The default value is 0, which means there is no limit to the number of volumes that may be created.

Edit a tier

The platform default storage method is Progressive. If you wish to change this default, set a value for each tier you wish to change in every datacenter.

Set the storage allocation method for the tier:

The platform default is "Progressive"
Set "Progressive" or "Performance" for the tier at datacenter level

Limitations and Clarifications

NFS shares are folders on a shared disk. Abiquo does not control the space used across multiple folders, so the best practice is to add only ONE shared folder per device.

NFS shares are included in the list of datastores on hosts (as disabled) but Abiquo will not protect them. This means that a Cloud Admin could enable one of them as a hypervisor datastore for Abiquo to deploy standard VMs on. For this reason, Cloud Admins must be aware of the designated use of each storage device and datastore to ensure NFS disks used for persistent VMs are not used as datastores for non-persistent VMs too.

Abiquo will not allow you to add the datacenter's NFS Repository as a storage pool via the GUI or API.

As for all external storage, Abiquo supports VM movements but not volume movements.

The firewall requirements are access to NFS on ports TCP/UDP 2049 and TCP/UDP 111 (RPC) for the following servers:

In a distributed installation, Remote Services and V2V server
In a monolithic installation, the Abiquo Server