Nexenta

NexentaStor Appliance is NAS/SAN software platform designed for building reliable and fast network storage arrays. The NexentaStor is based on the OpenSolaris and uses ZFS as a disk management system. NexentaStor can serve as a storage node for the OpenStack and provide block-level volumes for the virtual servers via iSCSI protocol.

The Nexenta driver allows you to use Nexenta SA to store Nova volumes. Every Nova volume is represented by a single zvol in a predefined Nexenta volume. For every new volume the driver creates a iSCSI target and iSCSI target group that are used to access it from compute hosts.

To use Nova with Nexenta Storage Appliance, you should:

set volume_driver=nova.volume.nexenta.volume.NexentaDriver.
set --nexenta_host flag to the hostname or IP of your NexentaStor
set --nexenta_user and --nexenta_password to the username and password of the user with all necessary privileges on the appliance, including the access to REST API
set --nexenta_volume to the name of the volume on the appliance that you would like to use in Nova, or create a volume named nova (it will be used by default)

Nexenta driver has a lot of tunable flags. Some of them you might want to change:

nexenta_target_prefix defines the prefix that will be prepended to volume id to form target name on Nexenta
nexenta_target_group_prefix defines the prefix for target groups
nexenta_blocksize can be set to the size of the blocks in newly created zvols on appliance, with the suffix; for example, the default 8K means 8 kilobytes
nexenta_sparse is boolean and can be set to use sparse zvols to save space on appliance

Some flags that you might want to keep with the default values:

nexenta_rest_port is the port where Nexenta listens for REST requests (the same port where the NMV works)
nexenta_rest_protocol can be set to http or https, but the default is auto which makes the driver try to use HTTP and switch to HTTPS in case of failure
nexenta_iscsi_target_portal_port is the port to connect to Nexenta over iSCSI

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