Install Data Stores

After you successfully installed the Control Panel server and compute resources, you can follow one of the next procedures to set up data stores:

Please note that CentOS 6 reached End of Life and is not longer supported. That is why we recommend you upgrade to CentOS 7.

Before You Begin

  • To configure an Integrated Storage data store, see the Storage guide.
  • The following procedures assume that you have already configured a compute resource to see the ISCSI/ATAoE block device to connect to and that the SAN disk will be shown when running fdisk -l.
  • All compute resources need access to the same data store. Ensure that you have the block device visible on all compute resources.
  • OnApp doesn’t support the 4 K block size for local LVM data stores.
  • OnApp provides and maintains integration with StorPool, whereas each VS disk becomes a separate volume in the StorPool storage system. For details, refer to StorPool section of our documentation.
  • VERY IMPORTANT: Perform the procedures only once per data store! Take care when selecting the disk/partition you want to use for storing virtual servers data!



See also:

Install Control Panel Server

Install Backup Server

Install LVM Data Store


To install an LVM data store, follow the next procedure:

  1. Add the new data store to OnApp via the Control Panel user interface:
    • Go to your Control Panel > Admin > Settings menu.
    • Click the Data Stores icon.
    • Click the Create Data Store button at the bottom of the screen.
    • Follow the steps in the creation wizard:

      Step 1 

      • Enter a Label and IP Address for your data store.
      • Select the data store type: LVM.
      • Move the slider to the right to enable a data store. When disabled, OnApp will not allow new disks to be created automatically on that data store. This is useful to prevent an established data store from becoming too full. It also lets you prevent the automatic creation of root disks on 'special' data stores (high speed, etc).
      • Click Next.

      Step 2

      • Set disk capacity in GB.
      • If required, you can also bind the data store with a local compute resource. This is helpful if you want that the data store and a compute resource were located on the same physical server, thus decreasing the time needed for a compute resource-data store connection.
      • If required, you can also assign the data store to a data store zone. The drop-down menu lists all data store zones set up in the cloud (to add or edit data store zones, see Data Store Zones).
    • When you are finished configuring the data store, click the Create Data Store button.
      To use the data store, you have to assign it either to a compute resource or a compute zone.
  2. Find the data store unique identifier (this is needed to create your volume group in step #4):
    (Read the IDENTIFIER from the data stores screen: http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/settings/data_stores)

  3. Connect via SSH to a compute resource that is able to connect to this data store. Create the physical volume:

    # pvcreate --metadatasize 50M /dev/xxx

     Replace xxx with the real device.

  4. Create the volume group:

    # vgcreate onapp-IDENTIFIER /dev/xxx

    Replace xxx with the real device and IDENTIFIER with the info from the data store page on the UI.

  5. Test compute resource/volume group visibility. Now when you have the new data store formatted, you should be able to see the volume group from all compute resources. To test this, run pvscan and vgscan on all compute resources. Make sure you can see all identifiers on all compute resources.


Install Integrated Storage Data Store


Before creating an Integrated Storage data store:

  1. Create one or more KVM compute resource with Integrated Storage enabled to group their drives together into a virtual data store.
  2. Create a compute zone.
  3. Add your compute resources to the compute zone.

After running these steps, you can proceed to the Integrated Storage data store creation.

To create a new Integrated Storage data store:

  1. Go to your Control Panel > Cloud > Integrated Storage > Data Stores menu.
  2. On the screen that appears, you’ll see the list of all Integrated Storage data stores in the cloud.
  3. To create a new data store, click the Create New Integrated Storage Data Store button, and complete the wizard that follows: 
  • Name - give your data store a name
  • Show advanced options  - select this check box to reveal the list of advanced settings:
    • Replicas - specify the number of data copies to increase the resilience to individual drive failure. You can specify 1, 2 or 4 replicas.
    • Stripes - specify the number of data splittings to increase the number of physical disks included to the virtual disk. You can specify 0, 2 or 4 stripes.
    • Overcommit - specify the over-provisioning percentage. You can set the following overcommit values: none (0%), 20%, 50% or unlimited (100%).

In order for your hard drives (nodes) to be detected and active, multicast traffic should be enabled on your switch, for the Onapp Integrated Storage Network/VLAN.

  • Storage Nodes
    • Filter by compute resource - use this to filter the nodes (disks) available for inclusion in this data store, by specific compute resources.
    • Filter by performance - use this to filter the nodes available for inclusion in this data store by performance.

4. Click the Save button to create the data store. The data store must be assigned to a compute zone and data store zone before you can provision storage to a VS.


Install SolidFire Data Store


You can create one SolidFire data store per cloud that will represent the space available at the SolidFire side.

To create a SolidFire data store:

  1. Go to your Control Panel > Admin > Settings menu.
  2. Click the Data Stores icon.
  3. Click the Create Data Store button at the bottom of the screen.
  4. Follow the steps in the creation wizard:
    Step 1 of 3
    • Enter a data store label.
    • Specify an IP address to be used for managing the data store via CP (Inasmuch SolidFire data stores have two interfaces, you'll have to specify the IP address for the cluster admin later.)
    • Select a SolidFire data store type.
    • Move the slider to the right to enable a data store. When disabled, OnApp will not allow new disks to be created automatically on that data store. This is useful to prevent an established data store from becoming too full. It also lets you prevent the automatic creation of root disks on 'special' data stores (high speed, etc).
    • Click Next.
    Step 2 of 3
    • Set disk capacity in GB.
    • If required, you can also bind the data store with a local compute resource. This is helpful if you wish that the data store and a compute resource were located on the same physical server thus decreasing the time needed for a compute resource-data store connection.
    • If required, you can also assign the data store to a data store zone. The drop-down menu lists all data store zones set up in the cloud (to add or edit data store zones, see the section on Data store zones in the Settings section of this guide).
    Step 3
    • Specify the cluster Admin settings:
      • iSCSI IP - iSCSI IP address
      • Username - specify a username for cluster authorization
      • Password - specify a password for cluster authorization
    • Specify the SolidFire Account settings:
      • Username - specify SolidFire account username
      • Initiator secret - specify iSCSI initiator secret (optional)
      • Target secret - specify iSCSI initiator secret (optional)

Initiator secret and target secret are optional parameters. They are created automatically for a newly created account. For the new account they will be taken from the SolidFire database. If you specify target and initiator secrets for an existing user, they will be overwritten.

5. When you've finished configuring the store, click the Create Data Store button.