Open Stack

----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Arroyo" <droyo at aqwari.net>
> To: openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to pass entire disks to my openstack instances. I have
> some IO-bound workloads and would like to avoid any overhead or
> contention by giving an instance access to N additional disks, such
> that they do not share that disk with other guests on the same compute
> node.
> 
> These additional disks do not need to last longer than the instances
> themselves; they are "ephemeral" in that regard. There is no need for
> backup, no need for instance or data migration, and no need for running
> the instance on a separate compute node from the extra disks.
> Effectively I want to have an "extra disks" property, as part of a
> flavor or image, that is handled like vcpus without overcommit.
> 
> I have been doing some research but have not yet found an obvious way
> to do this in openstack. Does anyone else have a similar use case, and
> how have you handled it? To be more specific, we run some very large
> Cassandra clusters on physical hardware, with excellent performance.
> Cassandra is largely IO-bound, and we want to virtualize it without
> introducing unnecessary IO latency.
> 
> Cheers,
> David

Have you looked at the BlockDeviceDriver as described here:

    http://cloudgeekz.com/71/how-to-setup-openstack-to-use-local-disks-for-instances.html

-Steve