+ Admin Guide Overview
The QuantaStor Administrator Guide is intended for all IT administrators working to setup or maintain a QuantaStor system or grid of systems as well as for those just looking to get a deeper understanding of how the QuantaStor software defined storage 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.
Using the Web Interface
The terms and navigation conventions this guide uses to describe the web management interface.
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| Web UI Definition | The name this guide gives to each region of the web interface -- tabs, tree, grids and panels. |
| Navigation for Dialog Access | How a Navigation breadcrumb in this guide maps to the tabs and toolbar. |
| Navigation using Right Click for Dialog Access | Reaching the same dialogs from an object's right-click context menu. |
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 behaviour 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. |
| Configure Member Standby | Taking one node out of service per-node, while the rest of the cluster keeps operating and can fail over to it. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
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. |
Cluster Configuration
Highly available scale-up pools, and the scale-out Ceph configurations.
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Ceph Encryption Bypass | Excluding specific devices from Ceph's at-rest encryption. |
Optimization
Matching pool behaviour 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 behaviour. |
| 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.