Storage

This page introduces storage management with the Abiquo platform at the Infrastructure level. It describes Abiquo concepts of persistent storage and storage tiers for implementing storage service levels.

Persistent storage

The platform can manage external storage systems to offer self-service persistent storage to users. External storage can be used to allocate external storage volumes to VMs, or in private cloud to convert VM templates to persistent VM templates. Persistent templates save one or more VM disks to the storage platform, enabling you to take advantage of storage features such as high availability.

In private cloud, external storage platforms can be integrated iSCSI systems (e.g. NetApp, Nexenta) or any NFS device. It is also possible to add generic iSCSI storage volumes that are managed outside of Abiquo or even to create your own storage integration using the storage SDK.
In public cloud, in Amazon the platform creates EBS disks and in Azure the platform creates Managed Disks.

API Documentation

For the Abiquo API documentation of this feature, see Abiquo API Resources and the page for this resource StorageDevicesResource.

ESXi storage limitations

ESXi has a LUN limit of 256 LUNs per cluster. Abiquo offers integrated NFS storage to enable more volumes to be created.
A single storage device IP can be used more than once in Abiquo if different storage protocols (iSCSI and NFS) are used.

Privilege: Manage storage elements

In public cloud, the platform automatically manages storage tiers and users manage storage in virtual datacenters.

In private cloud, to manage a datacenter's external storage:

Go to Infrastructure → Private
In the datacenters list, select the datacenter to display datacenter details.
Go to Storage.

Here you can add storage devices and organize storage pools into tiers for storage service levels. See Manage Storage and Storage Pool Allocation

Related pages:

Manage volumes in private cloud Manage Persistent Storage and VMs
Manage volumes in public cloud: Manage storage in public cloud
Attach/detach volumes: VM storage

Datastore tiers

To provide different storage service levels in private cloud, you can add organize the datastores of your hypervisors into datastore tiers. You can manage tiers on the Datastore tiers tab or for each individual hypervisor. See Manage Datastore Service Levels with Datastore Tiers and Allocation Rules#Storage load level rules

The platform will copy VM templates to the hypervisor datastore and you can also create hard disks and allow users to create hard disks on the hypervisor datastores. For details of how to enable the display of the VM Hard disk tab, see Configuration View#General Tab. Users will also require privileges to Manage virtual machine hard disks.

Related pages

Allocation Rules#Storage load level rules
Hypervisor datastores: Compute in datacenters
Manage Datastore Service Levels with Datastore Tiers
Manage persistent storage volumes in virtual datacenters: Manage Persistent Storage and VMs
Manage auxiliary hard disks and volumes: VM storage
External iSCSI and NFS storage: Manage Storage
- Storage Pool Allocation