cinder-specs/specs/juno/smbfs-volume-driver.rst
Mike Perez 8ca13afc49 Introduce use case section
This will now require a separate section "Use Cases". This was
originally within "Problem description", but use cases seems to be
missed when it was filled out. This will hopefully improve spec
submission.

Change-Id: I3615ca5ff5c46851e682739a8343242e2f1b0a8d
2015-04-15 22:20:56 -07:00

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
License.
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=================
SMB Volume Driver
=================
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cinder/+spec/smbfs-volume-driver
Currently, there are Cinder volume drivers which make use of network-attached
storage file systems such as GlusterFS of NFS. The purpose of this blueprint
is adding a volume driver supporting SMB based volume backends.
Problem description
===================
SMB is a widely used protocol, especially in the Microsoft world. Its
simplicity along with the big improvements that were introduced in SMB 3
make this type of volume backend a very good alternative.
SMB 3 brings features such as transparent failover, multichanneling using
multiple NICs, encrypted communication, and RDMA.
Recent versions of Samba got improved support of the SMB 3 protocol, as well
as Active Directory integration.
This driver will be backwards compatible, supporting older versions of SMB.
It will support using any type of SMB share, including:
- from Scale-Out file servers to basic Windows shares;
- Linux Samba shares;
- vendor specific hardware exporting SMB shares.
Use Cases
=========
Proposed change
===============
The proposed driver will make use of Samba in order to mount and make use of
SMB shares in a secure way, supporting Active Directory based authentication.
This driver will include all the features required by the Juno release. It
will have a similar flow with other netowrk attached file system drivers,
managing images regarded as volumes while hosted on SMB shares.
It will include support for raw, qcow2, vhd and vhdx images. Even so, because
it will use qemu-img for image related operations, it will not support yet
snapshots for vhd and vhdx formats because of qemu-img's limitations.
The snapshot management will be done in a similar way as the Gluster driver,
using an additional ".info" file containing mappings between snapshot ids and
their actual paths. This is required as the path can change in time (for
example when deleting a snapshot from the chain, the backing file will be
changed).
Another driver based on this will be proposed for Windows environments, having
full vhd/vhdx support.
Alternatives
------------
None
Data model impact
-----------------
None
REST API impact
---------------
None
Security impact
---------------
None
Notifications impact
--------------------
None
Other end user impact
---------------------
None
Performance Impact
------------------
The driver will periodically ensure that the chosen shares are mounted and also
retrieve informations such as free space or total allocated space.
Certain volume related operations will require to be synchronized.
In order to use local shares, the share paths will be read from the Samba
config file.
Other deployer impact
---------------------
The user will provide a list of SMB shares on which volumes may reside. This
list will be placed in a file located at a path configured in the cinder config
file. This share list may contain SMB mount options such as flags or
credentials.
The config file will also contain the path to the Samba config file. Oversubmit
and used space ratios may also be configured.
The user will be able to choose the volume type that will be used as well as
choosing whether to use sparsed or qcow2 files instead of raw files. Depending
on the available qemu-img version, vhd and vhdx formats may also be used.
The volume type may be parsed as extra spec when creating a volume.
Developer impact
----------------
None
Implementation
==============
Assignee(s)
-----------
Primary assignee:
<lpetrut@cloudbasesolutions.com>
Other contributors:
<gsamfira@cloudbasesoltions.com>
Work Items
----------
Provide support for mounting SMB shares in the remotefs client and also using
local shares.
Get SMB share status such as free space or allocated space.
Provide volume related operations support using images hosted on SMB shares.
Dependencies
============
Libvirt smbfs volume driver blueprint:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/libvirt-smbfs-volume-support
Hyper-V smbfs volume driver blueprint:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/hyper-v-smbfs-volume-support
Testing
=======
A Cinder CI will be testing the SMB related features.
Documentation Impact
====================
Using the SMB backend will be documented.
References
==========
Samba wiki page:
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Main_Page