+ Admin Guide Overview
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.
Contents
- 1 Definitions
- 1.1 Storage System
- 1.2 Storage Pool
- 1.3 Storage Volume
- 1.4 Storage Volume Group
- 1.5 Snapshot Schedules
- 1.6 Host
- 1.7 Host Group
- 1.8 Storage Cloud
- 1.9 Storage Quota
- 1.10 Roles
- 1.11 Permissions
- 1.12 Users
- 1.13 User Groups
- 1.14 Target Port
- 1.15 Sessions
- 1.16 CHAP Authentication
- 1.17 Alerts
- 1.18 Events
- 1.19 Tasks
- 2 Target Port Configuration
- 3 Alert Settings
- 4 Managing Hosts
- 5 Managing Snapshot Schedules
- 6 Managing Sessions
- 7 Managing Storage Volumes
Definitions
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 using QuantaStor.
Storage System
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.
Storage Pool
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
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
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.
Snapshot Schedules
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
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 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.