Chapter 7. Storage
Virtual mobile VNFs requires storage for the following:
- Images (Glance)
- Storing CDR (Call Data Records) used for billing
- Video and Web caching
- Logging data, core files, availability & performance statistics, files and snapshots useful for technical support and other stateful information
While some NEPs clearly recommend using fully redundant CEPH deployment for storage, most work with both local and cloud storage options as long as the storage can be provisioned and deployed using OpenStack. Mobile VNFs are known to use Cinder and Glance OpenStack services:
- For the Glance service, you need enough storage to provide the space needed to hold your images (such as qcow images that are perhaps a couple hundred MB and bootable installation ISO images such as a 4GB Red Hat Enterprise Linux install image).
- For the Cinder service, you need enough storage to provide the block storage needed for your VMs to run. For our example, we started out with a 25GB NFS share for Glance and a 100GB NFS share for Cinder.
Both persistent and ephemeral storage may be requested and used by mobile applications.
Three types of storage solutions have been used in deployments:
- Local storage - Early deployments using mostly rack-mount servers with local storage slots
- Cloud storage - Storage provided by commercial storage vendors (EMC, NetApp etc.)
- Ceph storage - Either external or part of Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment using director.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform director creates a cloud environment called the Overcloud. The director provides the ability to configure extra features for an Overcloud. One of these extra features includes integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage. This includes both Red Hat Ceph Storage clusters created with the director or existing Ceph Storage clusters. This guide provides information for integrating Red Hat Ceph Storage into your Overcloud through the director and configuration examples. (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en/red-hat-openstack-platform/10/paged/red-hat-ceph-storage-for-the-overcloud/)
For virtual mobile deployment, we recommend using OpenStack director installation to create the Ceph cluster. The Ceph cluster is made up of two main components:
- Ceph OSD (Object Storage Daemon) which is deployed on three dedicated Ceph nodes. Replication, rebalancing, recovery, monitoring and reporting functions are performed by OSD nodes.
- Ceph Monitor maintains a master copy of Ceph storage map with the current state of the storage cluster. For virtual mobile deployment, we will use OpenStack controller nodes to host Cep monitor function
This is shown in Figure 15.
Figure 15: Ceph cluster for virtual mobile networks <<<
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