Deployment Choice: Utilizing Share Servers

Deployment Choice: Utilizing Share Servers

NetApp’s Manila drivers for ONTAP (with or without the management of share servers) are offered in a single, unified driver.

Where to Obtain the Drivers

NetApp’s contribution strategy involves adding all new capabilities directly into the upstream OpenStack Shared File System service repositories, so all the features are available regardless of which distribution you choose when deploying OpenStack. Bug fixes are delivered into the appropriate branches that represent the different releases of OpenStack.

On occasion, it may be necessary for NetApp to deliver capability to a previous release of OpenStack that can not be accepted in the upstream OpenStack repositories. In that case, we post the capability at the NetApp Github repository - accessible at https://github.com/NetApp/manila. Be sure to choose the branch from this repository that matches the release version of OpenStack you are deploying with. There will be a README file in the root of the repository that describes the specific changes that are merged into that repository beyond what is available in the upstream repository.

Share Networks

Manila offers the capability for shares to be accessible through tenant-defined networks (defined within Neutron). This is achieved by defining a share network object, which provides the relationship to the Neutron network and subnet from which an IP address should be allocated, as well as configured on the backend storage (along with the appropriate segmentation approach (e.g. VLAN, VXLAN, GRE, etc).

Share Servers

Offering this capability to end users places certain requirements on storage platforms that are integrated with Manila to be able to dynamically configure themselves. Share servers are an object defined by Manila that manages the relationship between share networks and shares. In the case of the reference driver implementation, a share server corresponds to an actual Nova instance that provides the file system service, with raw capacity provided through attached Cinder block storage volumes. In the case of the Manila driver for NetApp ONTAP, a share server corresponds to a storage virtual machine (SVM), also referred to as a Vserver.

Note

One share server is created by Manila for each share network that has shares associated with it.

Important

When deploying Manila with NetApp ONTAP without share server management, NetApp requires that each Manila backend refer to a single SVM within a cluster through the use of the netapp_vserver configuration option.

With Share Server Management

Within the ONTAP driver with share server support, a storage virtual machine will be created for each share server. While this can provide some advantages with regards to secure multitenancy and integration with a variety of network services within OpenStack, care must be taken to ensure that the scale limits are enforced through Manila quotas. It is a documented best practice to not exceed 200 SVMs running on a single cluster at any given time to ensure consistent performance and responsive management operations.

Without Share Server Management

With the ONTAP driver without share server support, data LIFs are reused and the provisioning of new Manila shares (i.e. FlexVol volumes) is limited to the scope of a single SVM.