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The QuantaStor Administrators Guide is intended for all administrators and cloud users who plan to manage their storage using QuantaStor Manager as well as for those just looking to get a deeper understanding of how the QuantaStor Storage System Platform (SSP) works.
[[Category:admin_guide]]
The Administrator Guide provides documentation on how to configure all aspects of QuantaStor systems and storage grids, with a primary focus on the web user interface (WUI) and a secondary focus on how to automate using the QuantaStor CLI. In contrast the [[+ User Guide Overview|User Guide]] focuses on using QuantaStor storage and accessing it from various operating systems, and on the client-side configuration steps that involves.


== Definitions ==
It is written for IT administrators setting up or maintaining a system or grid, and for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of how the platform works. Each section below groups related topics, with a one-line summary of what each page covers so you can find the right one without opening several. If you are new to the interface, start with [[Using the Web Interface]]; if you are bringing up a new appliance, start with '''System & Grid'''. For the commands referenced throughout, see the [[+ CLI Guide Overview|CLI Guide]] and the [[QuantaStor CLI Command Reference]].


The following series of definitions are here to lay the ground work and context for the rest of the document.  Here we define all the various objects and elements that can be managed via the QuantaStor Manager web interface or via the QuantaStor Remote Management CLI (available for Windows & Linux).
== Using the Web Interface ==


=== Storage System ===
The web management interface itself: its screen regions, its nine main tabs, and the navigation conventions this guide uses to describe it.


The storage system is the object that represents the entire iSCSI server both from a physical and logical standpoint.  This includes all the physical disks, fans, enclosures, power supplies and other physical elements of the system as well as all the logical elements including the storage pools, volumes, users, and storage clouds.
{| class="wikitable"
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[Using the Web Interface]] || Logging in, every region of the screen, the nine main tabs, toolbar groups and the overflow chevron, right-click menus, and how to read a '''Navigation''' breadcrumb.
|}


=== Storage Pool ===
== System & Grid ==
The storage pool is an aggregation of one or more physical disks into a larger entity.  Each storage pool has a single RAID type associated with it, and all storage volumes that are created within that storage pool inherit RAID type.  For example, if a given storage pool of type RAID1 (mirroring) is made up to two 1TB disks, then there is 1TB of usable storage available to create storage volumes (LUNs) with.


=== Storage Volume ===
Bringing up an appliance, joining it to a grid, licensing it, and recovering its configuration.
The storage volume is the most important object in the system as it represents the virtual disk device that is presented to the host a LUN.  Each storage volume has a unique name and a unique target number and a unique IQN associated with it.  Storage volumes can be created "thin" which means they do not use up any disk space until the device has been written to.  Or "thick" which means that all the space for the storage volume is pre-reserved up front.


=== Storage Volume Group ===
{| class="wikitable"
Often times hosts and virtual machines will be comprised of more than one storage volume. Sometimes one storage volume is dedicated as a boot disk and another as a swap disk.  In other cases there are multiple disks utilized to separate out the elements of a database application (index, data, log) into separate storage volumes for improved performance.  Whatever the reason, it can become difficult to manage you storage system without a way to group these storage volumes together so that they can be operated on as a single unit. That's what Storage Volume Groups provide.  They're simple containers for collecting together an arbitrary set of storage volumes so that they can be cloned, snapshot, or even deleted as a group.
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[Storage System]] || A single QuantaStor appliance, physical or virtual, and the settings on its Modify dialog.
|-
| [[Storage System Optimization]] || System tunables controlling cache behavior and Storage Pool I/O, and how the tunables file works.
|-
| [[Grid Configuration]] || Combining multiple systems into one Storage Grid managed as a single unit.
|-
| [[License Management]] || Applying and managing the license every system requires before the software can be used.
|-
| [[Recovery Manager]] || Restoring the internal configuration database from one of its automatic backups.
|}


=== Snapshot Schedules ===
== Hardware Configuration ==
Snapshot schedules are a powerful tool for automatically generating recovery points (snapshots), on a schedule so that you don't have to think about it.  The snapshot schedule consists of a list of storage volumes to be snapshot, and a list of days of the week and hours of the day at which the snapshots are to be taken.  A 'max snapshots' parameter sets the point at which the oldest snapshot created by the schedule should be cleaned up (default: 10).


=== Host ===
Network interfaces, disks, controllers and third-party enclosures -- the physical layer beneath a Storage Pool.


A host represents a server, workstation, laptop, or virtual machine that has a software or hardware iSCSI initiator by which it can access storage volumes (iSCSI targets) exposed by the storage system.  Hosts are identified by one or more initiator IQNs and IP addresses. We recommend that you identify your hosts by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI IQN] as that has the most flexibility since IP addresses can frequently change, especially if a host is using DHCP to acquire it's IP address.
{| class="wikitable"
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[Network Ports]] || The Ethernet interfaces used for management and storage access, plus bonding, VLANs, virtual ports and static routes.
|-
| [[Physical Disks/Devices]] || Identifying, scanning, formatting and importing the physical disks a system can see.
|-
| [[Hardware Controllers & Enclosures]] || QuantaStor's integration modules for the major HBA and RAID controller models.
|-
| [[Multipath Configuration]] || Redundant SAS paths to dual-ported media, which QuantaStor configures automatically where it can.
|-
| [[External Systems Configuration]] || Disk enclosures and arrays from other vendors, used as the media behind a Storage Pool.
|-
| style="padding-left: 2.5em;" | [[Western Digital (WD) Data24 Configuration|Western Digital (WD) Data24]] || An NVMe-oF JBOF attached over RDMA (RoCE), including driver and lossless-network setup.
|-
| style="padding-left: 2.5em;" | [[Seagate Corvault Configuration|Seagate Corvault]] || A SAS-attached array that does its own RAID and presents large logical volumes.
|}


=== Host Group ===
== Storage Provisioning ==
A host group is an arbitrary collection of hosts that have been grouped together for some purpose.  Sometimes they're grouped together by location, but more ofter Host Groups are used to group together hosts that have been formed into a cluster such as a Microsoft Fail-over Cluster / MSCS.  In other cases as with VMWare or XenServer multiple hosts can be combined together to form "resource pools" in which the virtual machines can live migrate from one host to another.  In all these cases, each host typically needs access to all the same storage volumes in order to facilitate fail-over.  This can be a tedious process with many storage systems as most require that an assignment operation be executed for each host and each volume.  If you have 10 hosts and 100 volumes, that amounts to 1000 storage assignment tasks and potentially days of work.  With QuantaStor we've tried our best to make that a snap, and Host Groups are key to making that possible.  Using the same scenario but with 1 host group and 100 volumes, the storage assignment to the group of 10 hosts can be done in a single operation through QuantaStor manager in less than a minute.


=== Storage Cloud ===
Turning physical media into pools, then into the block, file and object storage that clients consume.
Storage Clouds are essentially virtual storage systems.  One of the key unique offerings that QuantaStor brings to storage management, storage clouds make it so that you can give groups of users private storage clouds so that the storage system effectively support multi-tenancy.


=== Storage Quota ===
{| class="wikitable"
Storage quotas go hand-in-hand with storage clouds. Quotas define a set amount of storage that can be provisioned from a Storage Pool from a specific Storage Cloud. More specifically, storage quotas allow you to define the amount of storage that can be thin-provisioned as well as the amount that can be utilized/reserved.  The also allow the administrator to set the maximum number of volumes that can be created by a given cloud.
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[Storage Pools]] || Aggregating one or more disks into a pool of fault-tolerant storage.
|-
| [[Provisioning Tiers]] || Grouping pools together so automated frameworks such as OpenStack Cinder can provision from a tier.
|-
| [[Storage Volumes]] || Block devices (LUNs) accessed over iSCSI, Fibre Channel or Infiniband/SRP.
|-
| style="padding-left: 2.5em;" | [[Clustered SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations]] || Sharing client reservations across an HA group so Hyper-V, WSFC and SQL Server clusters survive a failover.
|-
| [[Fibre Channel Target Port Management]] || Exposing volumes as LUNs to Fibre Channel initiator hosts alongside iSCSI.
|-
| [[Network Shares]] || NAS access to a pool over NFSv3, NFSv4, SMB2 and SMB3.
|-
| [[NFS Configuration]] || The two NFS server implementations, and which one applies to a given storage architecture.
|-
| [[Multi-protocol File Locking]] || Locking on shares used by NFS and SMB clients at once, the setting that makes it coherent, and its limits.
|-
| [[Cloud Containers / NAS Gateway]] || Mapping an object-storage bucket to a Network Share so it can be accessed as files.
|}


=== Roles ===
== Security, Alerting & Upgrades ==
There are four (4) predefined roles that come with the initial storage system configuration which include:
* Administrator
** Administrators have full access to manage all aspects of the storage system.  They can create new roles, users, storage pools, reconfigure target ports, everything.
* Cloud Administrator
** Cloud administrators are limited to managing just the resources contained within the storage cloud to which they are a member. This includes the storage volumes, snapshot schedules, and hosts within their cloud.  Cloud administrators can only view the resources that are within the cloud to which they are a member, all other resources in the system are private and invisible to the cloud admin.
* Cloud User
** Cloud users can only view the resources within their cloud, just like the Cloud Administrator, but they have limited ability to manage storage volumes.  More specifically, they can only snapshot, clone, and delete storage volumes they've access rights to. (By default when a user creates a storage volume or other resource they have access rights to modify that resource but the Administrator can add/remove rights afterward).
* System Monitor
** System monitors can only view the objects within the system.  This role is useful for creating monitoring agents or for providing people in administrative roles a way of viewing the storage system without being able to change its configuration.


Besides the include roles outlined above, you can create as many custom roles as you like.  Each role consists of a list of object action permissions coupled with a scope at which that action can be exercised.  For example, there's a permission for "Storage Volume : view" which allows users to view storage volumes.  If you add this permission to a role and assign it at a scope of 'system' then the user associated with that role can view all storage volumes in the system.  If on the other hand the scope is set to 'user' then the user will only be able to view storage volumes that he/she created.  This RBAC system with scoping is unique to QuantaStor & QuantaGrid and is a core technology behind our Storage Clouds.
Controlling who can do what, learning when a system needs attention, and keeping it patched.


=== Permissions ===
{| class="wikitable"
Permissions are simply a combination of an object and an action. For example here are some of the permissions associated with the Storage Volume object:
! Topic !! Description
* storage volume : view
|-
* storage volume : create
| [[Security Configuration]] || Users, roles and RBAC, multi-factor authentication, certificates, the firewall and audit logging.
* storage volume : delete
|-
* storage volume : snapshot
| [[Call-home / Alerting]] || How a grid notifies you when systems need attention, including the ITSM integrations.
* storage volume : clone
|-
* storage volume : restore
| [[Upgrade Manager]] || Kernel, driver, security and core QuantaStor package updates.
* storage volume : assign
|-
* storage volume : unassign
| [[Send System Log Report]] || Collecting the configuration and log bundle OSNEXUS support asks for on a new ticket.
When permissions are assigned to a role there is another element that's added, and that's the permission scope. The permission scope defines at what level the user is allowed to exercise the granted permission.  Permission scopes include 'none', 'user', 'cloud', 'system', and 'grid'.
|-
| [[FIPS Mode]] || Running the appliance with the FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic module, and verifying it is active.
|-
| [[Encryption Bypass]] || Why QuantaStor does not encrypt devices that arrays such as Seagate Corvault, Seagate Exos E/EP and Dell PowerVault already encrypt in hardware, and how to add new vendor and model combinations as they are released. Applies to scale-up Storage Pools and scale-out OSDs alike.
|}


=== Users ===
== High-availability VIF Management ==


Each user is given a unique user name and password so that they may login and share in managing the storage system, and each users is associated with a specific role.  Some roles like the Cloud User and Cloud Administrator are only truly effective when the user is associated with a storage cloud.  Once associated with a cloud, cloud users and admins can access, view, or modify resources within that cloud within the permission limits of their role. All other resources in the system are invisible. 
The cluster heartbeat layer and the floating service addresses it manages, for both scale-out (Ceph) and scale-up (ZFS) storage clusters within a grid. Named for the main tab these are managed from.
  Note: Today QuantaStor does not support external authentication mechanisms
  like Active Directory but that is planned for a future release.


=== User Groups ===
{| class="wikitable"
Often times a given group of users will be associated with more than one storage cloud. The user group object represents an arbitrary collection of users and provides a simple way to keep track of groups of users thereby making it easier add large groups of users to/from storage clouds.
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[High-availability VIF Management]] || How cluster VIFs work: the grid, site cluster, heartbeat ring, HA group and VIF hierarchy, what triggers a failover and how long one takes, what blocks one, moving a VIF deliberately, and location constraints.
|-
| [[Site Cluster Setup]] || Creating a site cluster and its heartbeat rings, adding and removing members, and the corosync and pacemaker configuration it puts in place.
|-
| [[Cluster VIFs]] || Adding a cluster virtual interface and choosing its use case -- grid primary, scale-up storage pool, scale-out storage pool -- and what each type follows.
|-
| [[Configure Member Standby]] || Setting a node into standby moves all VIF resources and pools off it, so maintenance can be done without risk of a pool or resource moving onto it while the work is in progress.
|}


=== Target Port ===
== Snapshots & Replication ==
The target port represents an NIC or network interface card/port in your storage system.  1Ge ports are common in servers today and most servers typically have 2 x 1Ge ports.  The term target port comes from SCSI terminology where the device to be accessed is called a 'target' and the entity accessing the target is called the 'initiator'.  Hence the port in the storage system through which a target can be accessed is called a 'target port'.  You can add as many target ports to your system as your storage system's PCI bus has room for.  Some vendors like Intel sell dual and quad 1Ge port NICs, but if you find yourself needing larger numbers of ports to improve network throughput we suggest looking into adding 10Ge NICs to your QuataStor system.


=== Sessions ===
Point-in-time copies, scheduled backups, and getting data to a second site.


The session object represents and active iSCSI session between one of your hosts (aka initiator), and a specific storage volume (iSCSI target) in the QuantatStor storage system. Often times there will be more than one session connected to the same target as this forms multiple IO paths giving you improved performance and fail-over capabilities in the event a path is disconnected.  You can drop or disconnect a session from within QuantaStor Manager, but keep in mind that many iSCSI initiators will automatically re-establish a new session with the array automatically.  To permanently remove access to a volume from a host you'll need to unassign the volume using the 'Assign/Unassign Host Access' option. This appears in the pop-up menu when you right-click on a volume in QuantaStor Manager.  You can reassign access rights back to the host so that it can access the volume again at any time.
{| class="wikitable"
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[Snapshot Schedules]] || Automating space-efficient point-in-time snapshots of volumes and shares.
|-
| [[Backup Policies]] || Backing up any NFS or CIFS share on your network onto a QuantaStor system.
|-
| [[Remote-replication (DR)]] || Replicating both Storage Volumes (SAN) and Network Shares (NAS) to a remote system.
|-
| [[Bucket Synchronization Policies]] || Keeping object storage buckets in step across sites.
|}


=== CHAP Authentication ===
== Scale-out Cluster Configuration ==


CHAP stands for [Challenge-handshake Authentication Protocol|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge-handshake_authentication_protocol] and it provides you with a mechanism by which you can associated a username and a password with a specific iSCSI target / storage volume.  CHAP usernames & passwords are completely separate from the username & password that you use with the QuantaStor Manager web GUI.  Simply put, the CHAP username and password are just arbitrary values that you make up but they must be at least 12 characters in length.
Scale-out Ceph cluster setup and configuration.
To use CHAP with a specific volume you will need to press the 'Advanced Settings' button in the 'Modify Storage Volume' dialog in QuantaStor Manager.  Besides being able to set a storage volume specific CHAP username and password, QuantaStor allows you to set a default CHAP password for all the volumes in a ''storage cloud'' and additionally a default CHAP password for all ''storage volumes'' you own.


=== Alerts ===
{| class="wikitable"
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[Scale-out Block Setup (ceph)]] || Scale-out SAN built on Ceph.
|-
| [[Scale-out File Setup (ceph)]] || Scale-out NAS with access over native CephFS, SMB and NFS.
|-
| [[Scale-out Object Setup (ceph)]] || Scale-out object storage over the S3-compatible REST protocols.
|}


Alerts are simply messages from the system.  Some alerts are just informational such as when the system first starts it sends out a message that the system startup completed successfully.  Other alerts are warnings or errors indicating something serious has happened like a disk failure that needs to be addressed.  Alerts are shown in QuantaStor Manager at the bottom of the screen.
== Scale-up Cluster Configuration ==


=== Events ===
Highly available scale-up pool cluster configuration.


The QuantaStor service generates an event for each change that is made to the system.  It is via these events that the QuantaStor Manager web UI is able to keep itself state consistent with the service.  You don't see events anywhere as objects within QuantaStor Manager but you can view them using the CLI which can be useful if you're scripting and need to get notified when the system configuration has changed in some way.
{| class="wikitable"
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[HA Cluster Setup (JBODs)]] || Clustered pools on shared SAS JBODs, so a node or path outage does not take storage offline.
|-
| [[HA Cluster Setup (external SAN)]] || The same clustered pool configuration where the media comes from an external SAN.
|}


=== Tasks ===
== Optimization ==


Every configuration change to the system is handled via a task.  When you create a storage volume or do some other operation with the storage system, you'll notice a new task in the status bar at the bottom of the screen in QuantaStor Manager.  Some long running tasks (like batch creation of 300 volumes) can be canceled while they're running.  Just right-click the task in the task bar within QuantaStor Manager and choose cancel.
Matching pool behavior to your workload, and watching how the grid performs.


== Target Port Configuration ==
{| class="wikitable"
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[Performance Tuning]] || Pool I/O profiles, which set read-ahead, request queue depth and the I/O scheduler.
|-
| [[Performance Monitoring]] || The Grid Dashboard and the health and performance views built on it.
|}


== System Internals ==


How the platform is put together, for deeper troubleshooting and for extending it.


=== NIC Bonding / Trunking ===
{| class="wikitable"
! Topic !! Description
|-
| [[QuantaStor systemd Services]] || The internal services and the systemd units under <code>/lib/systemd/system</code> that manage them.
|-
| [[QuantaStor Configuration Files]] || The configuration files that let engineering and support customize platform behavior.
|-
| [[QuantaStor Shell Utilities]] || The <code>qs</code> CLI plus the <code>qs-*</code> helpers such as <code>qs-iostat</code>, <code>qs-sendlogs</code> and <code>qs-upgrade</code>.
|-
| [[QuantaStor Custom Scripting / Application Extensions]] || Script call-outs for integrating QuantaStor with custom applications.
|}


== Alert Settings ==
----
 
<small>''Verified against QuantaStor 6.9.0.''</small>
== Managing Hosts ==
 
== Managing Snapshot Schedules ==
=== Near Continuous Data Replication (N-CDP) ===
 
== Managing Sessions ==
 
The list of active iSCSI sessions with the storage system can be found by selecting the 'Storage System' tree-tab in QuantaStor Manager then selecting the 'Sessions' tab in the center view. Here's a screenshot of a list of active sessions as shown in QuantaStor Manager.
 
[[File:qs_session.png]]
 
=== Dropping Sessions ===
 
To drop an iSCSI session, just right-click on it and choose 'Drop Session' from the menu.  Keep in mind that some initiators will automatically re-establish a new iSCSI session if one is dropped by the storage system.  To prevent this, just unassign the storage volume from the host so that the host cannot re-login.
 
== Managing Storage Volumes ==
=== Creating & Deleting Storage Volumes ===
=== Creating Snapshots ===
=== Creating Clones ===
=== Restoring from Snapshots ===
=== Converting a Snapshot into a Primary ===
 
== IO Tuning ==
QuantaStor has a number of tunable parameters in the /etc/quantastor.conf file that can be adjusted to better match the needs of your application.  That said, we've spent a considerable amount of time tuning the system to efficiently support a broad set of application types so we do not recommend adjusting these settings unless you are a highly skilled Linux administrator.
The default contents of the /etc/quantastor.conf configuration file are as follows:
<pre>
[device]
nr_requests=2048
scheduler=deadline
read_ahead_kb=512
 
[mdadm]
chunk_size_kb=256
parity_layout=left-symmetric
 
[btrfs]
nodatasum=false
</pre>
 
There are tunable settings for device parameters, md array chunk-size and parity configuration settings, as well as some settings for btrfs.  These configuration settings are read from the configuration file dynamically each time one of the settings is needed so there's no need to restart the quantastor service.  Simply edit the file and the changes will be applied to the next operation that utilizes them.  For example, if you adjust the chunk_size_kb setting for mdadm then the next time a storage pool is created it will use the new chunk size.  Other tunable settings like the device settings will automatically be applied within a minute or so of your changes because the system periodically checks the disk configuration and updates it to match the tunable settings. 
Also, you can delete the quantastor.conf file and it will automatically use the defaults that you see listed above.

Latest revision as of 16:32, 28 September 2026

The Administrator Guide provides documentation on how to configure all aspects of QuantaStor systems and storage grids, with a primary focus on the web user interface (WUI) and a secondary focus on how to automate using the QuantaStor CLI. In contrast the User Guide focuses on using QuantaStor storage and accessing it from various operating systems, and on the client-side configuration steps that involves.

It is written for IT administrators setting up or maintaining a system or grid, and for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of how the platform works. Each section below groups related topics, with a one-line summary of what each page covers so you can find the right one without opening several. If you are new to the interface, start with Using the Web Interface; if you are bringing up a new appliance, start with System & Grid. For the commands referenced throughout, see the CLI Guide and the QuantaStor CLI Command Reference.

Using the Web Interface

The web management interface itself: its screen regions, its nine main tabs, and the navigation conventions this guide uses to describe it.

Topic Description
Using the Web Interface Logging in, every region of the screen, the nine main tabs, toolbar groups and the overflow chevron, right-click menus, and how to read a Navigation breadcrumb.

System & Grid

Bringing up an appliance, joining it to a grid, licensing it, and recovering its configuration.

Topic Description
Storage System A single QuantaStor appliance, physical or virtual, and the settings on its Modify dialog.
Storage System Optimization System tunables controlling cache behavior and Storage Pool I/O, and how the tunables file works.
Grid Configuration Combining multiple systems into one Storage Grid managed as a single unit.
License Management Applying and managing the license every system requires before the software can be used.
Recovery Manager Restoring the internal configuration database from one of its automatic backups.

Hardware Configuration

Network interfaces, disks, controllers and third-party enclosures -- the physical layer beneath a Storage Pool.

Topic Description
Network Ports The Ethernet interfaces used for management and storage access, plus bonding, VLANs, virtual ports and static routes.
Physical Disks/Devices Identifying, scanning, formatting and importing the physical disks a system can see.
Hardware Controllers & Enclosures QuantaStor's integration modules for the major HBA and RAID controller models.
Multipath Configuration Redundant SAS paths to dual-ported media, which QuantaStor configures automatically where it can.
External Systems Configuration Disk enclosures and arrays from other vendors, used as the media behind a Storage Pool.
Western Digital (WD) Data24 An NVMe-oF JBOF attached over RDMA (RoCE), including driver and lossless-network setup.
Seagate Corvault A SAS-attached array that does its own RAID and presents large logical volumes.

Storage Provisioning

Turning physical media into pools, then into the block, file and object storage that clients consume.

Topic Description
Storage Pools Aggregating one or more disks into a pool of fault-tolerant storage.
Provisioning Tiers Grouping pools together so automated frameworks such as OpenStack Cinder can provision from a tier.
Storage Volumes Block devices (LUNs) accessed over iSCSI, Fibre Channel or Infiniband/SRP.
Clustered SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations Sharing client reservations across an HA group so Hyper-V, WSFC and SQL Server clusters survive a failover.
Fibre Channel Target Port Management Exposing volumes as LUNs to Fibre Channel initiator hosts alongside iSCSI.
Network Shares NAS access to a pool over NFSv3, NFSv4, SMB2 and SMB3.
NFS Configuration The two NFS server implementations, and which one applies to a given storage architecture.
Multi-protocol File Locking Locking on shares used by NFS and SMB clients at once, the setting that makes it coherent, and its limits.
Cloud Containers / NAS Gateway Mapping an object-storage bucket to a Network Share so it can be accessed as files.

Security, Alerting & Upgrades

Controlling who can do what, learning when a system needs attention, and keeping it patched.

Topic Description
Security Configuration Users, roles and RBAC, multi-factor authentication, certificates, the firewall and audit logging.
Call-home / Alerting How a grid notifies you when systems need attention, including the ITSM integrations.
Upgrade Manager Kernel, driver, security and core QuantaStor package updates.
Send System Log Report Collecting the configuration and log bundle OSNEXUS support asks for on a new ticket.
FIPS Mode Running the appliance with the FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic module, and verifying it is active.
Encryption Bypass Why QuantaStor does not encrypt devices that arrays such as Seagate Corvault, Seagate Exos E/EP and Dell PowerVault already encrypt in hardware, and how to add new vendor and model combinations as they are released. Applies to scale-up Storage Pools and scale-out OSDs alike.

High-availability VIF Management

The cluster heartbeat layer and the floating service addresses it manages, for both scale-out (Ceph) and scale-up (ZFS) storage clusters within a grid. Named for the main tab these are managed from.

Topic Description
High-availability VIF Management How cluster VIFs work: the grid, site cluster, heartbeat ring, HA group and VIF hierarchy, what triggers a failover and how long one takes, what blocks one, moving a VIF deliberately, and location constraints.
Site Cluster Setup Creating a site cluster and its heartbeat rings, adding and removing members, and the corosync and pacemaker configuration it puts in place.
Cluster VIFs Adding a cluster virtual interface and choosing its use case -- grid primary, scale-up storage pool, scale-out storage pool -- and what each type follows.
Configure Member Standby Setting a node into standby moves all VIF resources and pools off it, so maintenance can be done without risk of a pool or resource moving onto it while the work is in progress.

Snapshots & Replication

Point-in-time copies, scheduled backups, and getting data to a second site.

Topic Description
Snapshot Schedules Automating space-efficient point-in-time snapshots of volumes and shares.
Backup Policies Backing up any NFS or CIFS share on your network onto a QuantaStor system.
Remote-replication (DR) Replicating both Storage Volumes (SAN) and Network Shares (NAS) to a remote system.
Bucket Synchronization Policies Keeping object storage buckets in step across sites.

Scale-out Cluster Configuration

Scale-out Ceph cluster setup and configuration.

Topic Description
Scale-out Block Setup (ceph) Scale-out SAN built on Ceph.
Scale-out File Setup (ceph) Scale-out NAS with access over native CephFS, SMB and NFS.
Scale-out Object Setup (ceph) Scale-out object storage over the S3-compatible REST protocols.

Scale-up Cluster Configuration

Highly available scale-up pool cluster configuration.

Topic Description
HA Cluster Setup (JBODs) Clustered pools on shared SAS JBODs, so a node or path outage does not take storage offline.
HA Cluster Setup (external SAN) The same clustered pool configuration where the media comes from an external SAN.

Optimization

Matching pool behavior to your workload, and watching how the grid performs.

Topic Description
Performance Tuning Pool I/O profiles, which set read-ahead, request queue depth and the I/O scheduler.
Performance Monitoring The Grid Dashboard and the health and performance views built on it.

System Internals

How the platform is put together, for deeper troubleshooting and for extending it.

Topic Description
QuantaStor systemd Services The internal services and the systemd units under /lib/systemd/system that manage them.
QuantaStor Configuration Files The configuration files that let engineering and support customize platform behavior.
QuantaStor Shell Utilities The qs CLI plus the qs-* helpers such as qs-iostat, qs-sendlogs and qs-upgrade.
QuantaStor Custom Scripting / Application Extensions Script call-outs for integrating QuantaStor with custom applications.

Verified against QuantaStor 6.9.0.

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