Storage Management Section

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Most of the common storage management operations like provisioning file and block storage are done within the main Storage Management tab section.

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License Key Management

All QuantaStor editions and product features are controlled by license key. If you have a system deployment that requires additional features or capacity your system can be expanded by adding an expansion license to your existing system license. New licenses have a one week grace period after being added to a given system within which they must be activated. To activate your license simply choose the 'Activate Online' or alternatively you may use the 'Activate via Email' option to have an activation code sent to you. If the activation grace period expires management operations will be blocked until the key is activated or replaced.

General System Configuration & Management

These core system configuration dialogs include most of the key administrative operations use to initially configure, upgrade, and maintain your system.

Network Interface Management

QuantaStor has a broad set of network management features including bonding/teaming, virtual interfaces and VLANs.

Hardware RAID Controller Management

QuantaStor supports the use of both hardware RAID and software RAID. When used together it provides many advantages both in terms of performance and ease of maintenance. Integrated hardware management modules are built into QuantaStor for LSI MegaRAID, Adaptec, HP SmartArray, Dell PERC, and other controllers. Please see our HCL for a full list of which adapters have integrated hardware management support.

Physical Disk Management

Hard disk drives of all types including SAS, SATA, and SSD appear to your QuantaStor System as disks. Although we use the term physical disk, in cases where hardware RAID is used the physical disk drives are actually logical drives (aka RAID units / virtual disks) coming from the hardware RAID controller. QuantaStor can also be configured to use virtual disks as storage when deployed as a virtual system and can also use storage devices from other storage systems when configured as a gateway system.

Storage Pool Management

A storage pool is a logical grouping of disks into a pool from which volumes (LUNs) and network shares can be provisioned. QuantaStor has support for ZFS Scale-Up and Ceph Scale-out pools. Once a pool is provisioned you can provision storage volumes and network shares using available space in the storage pool. One a pool is provisioned you can provision storage volumes and network shares using available space in the storage pool.

Network Share Management (CIFS/NFS)

Network shares provide network attached storage (NAS) capabilities. Each network share is provisioned from a specific storage pool so you must first create a pool of storage before provisioning shares. Once created you can control NFS and CIFS access to network shares.

Network Share Namespace Management

Network Shares Namespaces use Microsoft DFS and NFSv4 referrals to provide global namespace capabilities across the grid.

Storage Volume Management (iSCSI/FC LUNs)

Storage volumes (LUNs) are block devices which are made accessible via the iSCSI and/or FibreChannel protocols. Each storage volume is provisioned from a specific Storage Pool on a specific node within a grid of systems. In order to make a storage volume accessible to a host you must first add a Host to the system, then assign the storage to it.

Storage Volume Group Management

Storage volume groups provide a easy way to keep track of volumes when multiple are assigned or utilized for the same host. In cases where the volumes in a group reside within an Advanced storage pool you can also create snapshots of volume groups.

Snapshot Schedule Management

Snapshot schedules can be created to make instant snapshots of volumes for quick and easy recovery and rollback of data. To take advantage of Snapshots you must create a Storage Pool based on the ZFS filesystem which is the default.

Host Dialogs

A host entry must be added for each host that you want to assign storage volumes to. The host entry stores one or more initiator IDs which can include one or more FC WWPN and/or one or more iSCSI initiator IQNs.

Host Group Management

Host groups represent a collection of one or more Hosts. It's a convince object which allows you to group hosts together so that you can assign storage to the group in a single operation rather than having to assign storage to individual hosts which can take more time. Host groups are especially useful for use with VMware clusters and XenServer resource pools as in such cases all hosts in the group require shared access to the same group of disks.

Grid Management

Multiple QuantaStor nodes can be managed as a grid. One node will be assigned to be the primary node.