So I switched my Openstack backend this week to FreeNAS. I was running a three node Ceph cluster, but summer is coming and power isn’t free. So I whittled my install down to just 5 servers with this change.
The first challenge is I no longer would have an object store. I really like object stores, and one day I will figure out how to use them. In all seriousness, the cloud needs to use more of its own resources, so i decieded to implenment swift. The only issue is that I have 100TB ultra fast storage array, but no real way to use it with swift. TripleO by default will use the controller nodes to host the swift infrastuctre, which I was fine with. My controller nodes however are blades, and blades suck for storing data. My blades only have two drive slots, one for OS and one for swift.
So my idea was to use ISCSI Targets instead of 1TB SSD’s. The SSD’s are great and all, but they don’t hold a candle to a real storage array. I wanted to automate the process of both mounting and wiping the iscsi drives on the SAN, so I documented the process here http://project.fortnebula.com/docs/latest/openstack/tripleo/swift-iscsi.html