Virtual Storage

Enterprise Edition Functionality This feature is available in Abiquo Enterprise Edition

This is the system where all the users store the Virtual Block Devices that can be attached and mounted to every single Virtual Image. These Block Devices look like standard physical disks to the Virtual Machines and can be assigned through the Abiquo User Interface and API. Abiquo can manage a Virtual Storage per physical datacenter. This Virtual Storage can manage different types of  Storage Systems thanks to a plug-in architecture built by Abiquo. This architecture is composed of two components:

Storage Management System

This allows the management of multiple Storage Systems, acting as a Virtual Storage Factory. It exposes a REST API that can manage heterogeneous storage technologies with an homogeneous API. It also wraps the Virtual Storage Plugins which are the specific management libraries for every storage technology.

Virtual Storage Plugins

A Virtual Storage Plugin is a component that wraps the specific features of a storage technology to manage it from Abiquo. It must be installed in the appliance OS, or can be installed remotely if the storage technology has a public API.

This is the list of available storage plugins implemented:

• ZFS Opensolaris: Manages any ZFS Opensolaris backed storage solution.
• LVM & iSCSI Linux: Manages any storage based in Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Linux and iSCSI. For testing platforms.
• Nexenta: Manages any storage based in Nexenta.
• NetApp: Manages storage in NetApp cabinets.
• Others (Dell Equallogic, IBM Volume Manager): If it has an API, almost any storage technology can be managed from Abiquo. Contact us to know more about plugins in development and custom made solutions.

Hardware

Storage Appliances normally has exigent hardware specifications made by their manufacturers. You have to size these systems calculating the usage of the storage by the Abiquo platform. As a rule of thumb, Abiquo recommends a dedicated network with minimum speed rates higher than 1Gb and a 10GbE network backbone for the Storage Network.