Whew….Yesterday, Dell announced TWO OpenStack block storage capabilities (Equallogic & Ceph) for our OpenStack Essex Solution (I’m on the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team) and community edition. The addition of block storage effectively fills the “persistent storage” gap in the solution. I’m quadrupally excited because we now have:
- both open source (Ceph) and enterprise (Equallogic) choices
- both Nova drivers’ code is in the open at part of our open source Crowbar work
Frankly, I’ve been having trouble sitting on the news until Dell World because both features have been available in Github before the announcement (EQLX and Ceph-Barclamp). Such is the emerging intersection of corporate marketing and open source.
As you may expect, we are delivering them through Crowbar; however, we’ve already had customers pickup the EQLX code and apply it without Crowbar.
The Equallogic+Nova Connector
If you are using Crowbar 1.5 (Essex 2) then you already have the code! Of course, you still need to have the admin information for your SAN – we did not automate the configuration of the storage system, but the Nova Volume integration.
We have it under a split test so you need to do the following to enable the configuration options:
- Install OpenStack as normal
- Create the Nova proposal
- Enter “Raw” Attribute Mode
- Change the “volume_type” to “eqlx”
- Save
- The Equallogic options should be available in the custom attribute editor! (of course, you can edit in raw mode too)
Want Docs? Got them! Check out these > EQLX Driver Install Addendum
Usage note: the integration uses SSH sessions. It has been performance tested but not been tested at scale.
The Ceph+Nova Connector
The Ceph capability includes a Ceph barclamp! That means that all the work to setup and configure Ceph is done automatically done by Crowbar. Even better, their Nova barclamp (Ceph provides it from their site) will automatically find the Ceph proposal and link the components together!
Ceph has provided excellent directions and videos to support this install.
Rob Hirschfeld 
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Any reason that the equalogic volume driver has not been submitted upstream to the openstack codebase?
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This work is on Essex. We decided to focus on Cinder for upstream contributions where there was a clearer driver model.
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So this code will be (or has been??) submitted upstream?
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Will be. There’s a blue print for it.
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