Archiving OpenStack Cloud Volumes

Abstract

This report is a summary of solutions for archivation of Cinder volumes and user-driven creation of virtual volumes backups. Solutions are based and evaluated on current CERN private cloud status and currently used environments and tools. The explored solutions include use of TSM tape storage and two different clusters of Ceph in two different geographical locations(Meyrin and Wigner). CERN openlab Summer Student Report 2015 3 Table of Contents Introduction 4 OpenStack and Cinder 5 Ceph backend 6 Cinder backups 10 TSM Tivoli Storage Manager 10 Ceph 12 Conclusion 14 References 15 CERN openlab Summer Student Report 2015 4 Introduction Through the last years, cloud computing became popular with use across a lot of different application fields. This is caused by some of the features including better resource management and administration than different ways of computing. At the beginning cloud computing was mainly focused on providing computing power for users, but then it evolved and include delivery of all kinds of computer systems from volumes and databases to computer networks. See Figure 1. showing different types of cloud computing. Nowadays cloud computing goes hand to hand with close activities like software deployment and automation with emphasis on elasticity, scalability and usability. Figure 1. Different service models of cloud computing. At CERN we are shifting towards using cloud computing with our own cloud offered to our users. There are several services provided for users including tools for private Infrastructure-as-aService, which is mainly served by OpenStack and its projects like Cinder, and other big data tools used apart from different purposes as backend for our OpenStack cloud. In following chapters I will explain how I created my own working environment with small cloud, how to connect backend for virtual volume creation and how to provide Cinder backup feature for users. CERN openlab Summer Student Report 2015 5 OpenStack and Cinder OpenStack[1] is one of the most used cloud computing platforms, which provides Infrastructureas-a-Service. OpenStack consists of many projects, each one of them focused on different part of cloud management and different services. Among projects considered as core are Nova, directly working with virtual machines, Keystone, which provides authentication, Glance, dealing with images, Cinder, used for virtual volumes and some others. In my project I focused mainly on work with Cinder, which, as mentioned earlier, is an OpenStack component for management of block storage, which can serve as persistent data storage for critical application data volume. We can connect this volume to virtual machines, detach them and move them across multiple machines in same way as USB key. If machine with attached volume fails, we lost all the data saved on it, but data stored on cinder volumes is untouched as it is not stored locally but on the network attached volume. As Openstack consists of multiple projects connected together, its installation can be time consuming. Therefore there were created tools to package it and make it easier to deploy. One of the most used ones are Packstack[2], for deploying Openstack on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and distributions derived from these (such as CentOS, Scientific Linux and others). Other one is Devstack[3]. Packstack is perfect for developing, testing and evaluation of setups before deploying them in production environment. To install Packstack-based test environment inside CERN cloud I created and used following procedure: 1. Use large flavor when provisioning virtual machine in CERN cloud, because with the others creation of VMs inside won't be possible. I also used CC7 Extra image for the VM that was hosting my packstack as CC7 Base was causing many issues with volume attachment. However the time spent on debugging issues with CC7 base image allowed me to understand better Cinder and Nova components. 2. Once inside of VM, disable NetworkManager to prevent conflicts with nova-network. systemctl stop NetworkManager systemctl disable NetworkManager systemctl enable network 3. Turn off base protection in yum. Some of CERN repositores are protected and are installing wrong packages. sed -i 's/1/0/g' /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/protectbase.conf 4. Update, install Packstack and run it to install Openstack with nova-network. sudo yum update -y sudo yum install -y openstack-packstack packstack --allinone --os-neutron-install=n sudo yum install -y https://rdoproject.org/repos/rdo-release.rpm sudo yum update -y CERN openlab Summer Student Report 2015 6 5. Apply the fix on nova-network to prevent getting exceptions, while running. Restart service afterwards. sed -i 's/if interface:/if interface and interface !='\''lo'\'':/' /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nova/network/linux_net.py systemctl restart openstack-nova-network Before using OpenStack services it is necessary to create credentials variables for user through this command: . ~/keystonerc_admin In Horizon file can be downloaded from Access & Security -> API Access -> Download OpenStack RC File. Status of all the services can be listed by: