On 20/09/21 13:15 +0100, Sean Mooney wrote:

On Mon, 2021-09-20 at 17:12 +0530, open infra wrote:

...

Hi,

Is it possible to use a freenas storage instead of ceph cluster?

you could use it as a provider of nfs shares using the generic cinder nfs driver.

it also can provide isci volumes but there is no driver that can talk to free nas to actully create those.

https://github.com/iXsystems/cinder there is a FreeNAS cinder driver from iXsystems but i dont think they are involded with upstream development much. at least they are not listed on https://docs.openstack.org/cinder/rocky/reference/support-matrix.html

so your milage will vary but it should technially be possible to do. this is wehre there user docs are https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2/ which just point you back to the git repo so it does not look like there is much support unless you are willing to support it yourself.

...

Regards, Danishka

Note that these solutions for Cinder will give you a raw block device, even if an NFS file is used to back it. An OpenStack compute instance will attach the block device. If you want to use applications that write to a filesystem, you need to format the block device and create a file system, and mount it yourself from within the compute instance. And this is a fine thing to do.

Perhaps the most natural way to use a FreeNAS with OpenStack would be with Manila, which presents shared file systems like NFS directly for guest VMs to mount. Unfortunately, I don't know of a Manila driver for FreeNAS -- don't see one in the directory Sean referenced and we don't have one in-tree. I think it would be pretty easy to write, and I considered doing this at one point, but I no longer have a FreeNAS at home so I put it off.

The quickest way to use it in OpenStack without writing any driver code, though, as Sean said, would be with the generic Cinder nfs driver, assuming that a block device rather than a shared filesystem will work for your use case.