Tutorial: Enabling OpenStack Cinder Integration with SolidFire Storage

This tutorial describes mechanism to enable OpenStack Cinder integration between Platform9 and your SolidFire storage array. Please also refer to the video here for a demo of this integration.

For a tutorial on general Cinder integration with Platform9 refer here.

By default a Platform9 Managed OpenStack host enabled with block storage role uses Cinder driver for LVM (Linux Logical Volume manager). This example shows how to enable the SolidFire driver to integrate with a SolidFire storage appliance.

Requirements

• This guide applies to Platform9 Managed OpenStack for KVM
• You have one, and only one, host with the block storage role
• You have the information necessary to connect to the storage appliance and authenticate with it

Step 1

Log in as root onto the Linux host to which you have assigned Cinder block storage role.

Step 2

Change directory to /opt/pf9/etc/pf9-cindervolume-base/conf.d

Step 3

Create a file named cinder_override.conf with a single [DEFAULT] section containing configuration settings specifying the name of the Cinder driver and the parameters required to connect to the storage array. This example shows a sample configuration for SolidFire:

Step 4

Restart the pf9-cindervolume service. For example, on Enterprise Linux operating systems e.g. CentOS:

At this point, your Cinder block storage integration between Platform9 Managed OpenStack and SolidFire is complete! You should be able to leverage OpenStack features such as creating volumes and snapshots, mounting volumes on virtual machines, booting virtual machines using volumes, etc. This article describes a general workflow around using OpenStack Cinder with Platform9.