[one-users] Storage subsystem: which one?

[Fabian Wenk]

Hello Humberto

On 13.10.2011 11:03, Humberto N. Castejon Martinez wrote:
> Reading the Opennebula documentation, I believe there are two things I have
> to deal with:
>
> 1) The image repository, and whether it is shared or not between the
> front-end and the workers

I have some persistent Images which are used for "persistent" 
VMs. I have the images folder shared with NFS and I use tm_nfs. 
When starting a VM with a persistent images, it creates only a 
soft link in VM_DIR which points to the image in the images 
folder. If you want to have copied the persistent image into the 
VM_DIR on the cluster node, you would need tm_ssh. But then on 
startup the whole image will be copied to the cluster node into 
VM_DIR and on shutdown it will be copied back to the images folder.

> 2) The<VM_DIR>, that contains deployment files, etc for the VMs running on
> a worker. This directory may or not be shared between the front-end and the
> workers, but it should always be shared between the workers if we want live
> migration, right?

If you use tm_ssh you do not need to share this, if you use 
tm_nfs, you need to have it shared. The same with the images 
folder. For live migration you need a shared images folder and 
VM_DIR.

> Some of the questions I have are these (sorry if some of them seem stupid
> :-)):

They are not stupid, It took me some time to try out and see 
through how this things works, and so I had to change my setup a 
few times until OpenNebula an I were happy.

> - What are the implications of sharing or not the image repository  between
> the front-end and the workers (apart from the need to transfer images to the
> worker nodes in the latter case)?

See above.

> - What are the implications of sharing or not the<VM_DIR>  between the
> front-end and the workers?

Also above.

> - Can I use ZFS or MooseFs and still be able to live migrate VMs?

MooseFS [1] is a fault tolerant, network distributed file system 
(eg. over several servers). I do not know if ZFS can do this. 
MooseFS is similar like NFS, only that the data are distributed 
over several servers (including your local server). I guess live 
migration should work.

  [1] http://www.moosefs.org/

> - Will the<VM_DIR>  always hold a (copy of a) VM image for every VM running
> on a worker? Must the<VM-DIR>  be in the local hard drive of a worker or may
> it reside on an external shared storage?

See above, if used with tm_nfs, it is on a external shared 
storage (NFS server). When used with tm_ssh, it is on the local 
disk and all images (public or persistent) will be copied in full 
through ssh.

> I guess two factors i should also consider when choosing a solution are the
> following, right?
>
> - The speed of transferring VM images
> - The speed of cloning VM images

Yes. Access to a persistent image through NFS only transfers the 
data needed, cloning always creates a full copy. When you use 
tm_ssh, the image will always be copied in full through ssh 
(which also gives some CPU overhead on the front end and cluster 
node).

I hope this helps and my information are correct, if not, could 
somebody from OpenNebula please correct me.


bye
Fabian