Open Stack

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 10:57 PM, Kimball (US), Conrad 
<conrad.kimball at boeing.com> wrote:
> Is anyone using ScaleIO (from Dell EMC) as a Cinder storage provider? 
>  What has been your experience with it, and at what scale?

My employer has multiple customers using our OpenStack based cloud 
solution with ScaleIO as volume backend. These customers are mostly 
telco operators
running virtual network functions in their cloud, but there are 
customers using the cloud for other non telco IT purpose too. There are 
various types
and flavors of the ScaleIO deployments at these customers, including 
low footprint deployment providing nx100 GiB raw capacity with small 
number of
servers, medium capacity ultra HA systems with nx10 servers using 
multiple protection domains and fault sets, high capacity systems with 
petabyte
range raw capacity, hyperconverged systems running storage and compute 
services on the same servers. The general feedback from the customers 
are
positive, we did not hear about performance or stability issues.

However, one common property of these customers and deployments that 
none of them handle bare metal instances, therefore, we do not have 
experience
with that. In order to boot bare metal instance from ScaleIO volume, 
the BIOS should be able to act as ScaleIO client, which will likely 
never happen.
ScaleIO used to have a capability to expose the volumes over standard 
iSCSI, but this capability has been removed long time ago. As this was 
a feature
in the past, making Dell/EMC to re-introduce it may not be completely 
impossible if there is high enough interest for that. However, this 
would vanish
the power of the proprietary protocol which let the client to balance 
the load towards multiple servers.

Cheers,
gibi

> 
> Our enterprise storage team is moving to ScaleIO and wants our 
> OpenStack deployments to use it, so I’m looking for real life 
> experiences to calibrate vendor stories of wonderfulness.
> 
> One concern I do have is that it uses a proprietary protocol that in 
> turn requires a proprietary “data client”.  For VM hosting this 
> data client can be installed in the compute node host OS, but seems 
> like we wouldn’t be able to boot a bare-metal instance from a 
> ScaleIO-backed Cinder volume.
> 
> Conrad Kimball
> Associate Technical Fellow
> Enterprise Architecture
> Chief Architect, Enterprise Cloud Services
> conrad.kimball at boeing.com