On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 10:57 PM, Kimball (US), Conrad <conrad.kimball@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@boeing.com