Mellanox-Cinder

Overview

iSER (iSCSI over RDMA) Mellanox OpenStack support to Cinder.
This can allow 5x faster bandwidth compared to using iSCSI TCP.

For example, over RAM device LUN I got ~1.3GBps Vs. ~5.5GBps (TCP Vs. iSER), and much lower CPU overhead.

Grizzly Release

Installation

Getting the code

wget https://github.com/mellanox-openstack/cinder-iser/archive/stable/grizzly.zip
cd cinder-iser-stable-grizzly

Applying the patches

You have two choices:

1. To apply this support, replace the files under "cinder/cinder/" And "nova/nova/" Respectively.
2. Apply the patches under "cinder/" And "nova/", don't forget to copy "cinder/cinder/volume/iser.py" if you choose this way.

Configuration

In order to enable iSER, need to adjust these values at /etc/cinder/cinder.conf:

iser_ip_address = <ipoib/roce_address>
volume_driver = cinder.volume.drivers.lvm.LVMISERDriver

iser_ip_address is required to do a "discovery" over the IB/RoCE interface from the initiator side.

volume_driver points cinder to use the ISERDriver, instead the LVMISCSIDriver.

On nova-compute side change the following in /etc/nova/nova.conf:

libvirt_volume_drivers = iser=nova.virt.libvirt.volume.LibvirtISERVolumeDriver

Restart Cinder and Nova compute services

References

1. OpenStack solution page at Mellanox site

2. Source repository

3. Mellanox OFED web page For more details, please refer any inquiries to openstack@mellanox.com.

4. Cinder-controller

5. Cinder-node

6. Cinder-install

Return to Mellanox-OpenStack wiki page.