Overview
Datastore Types
Storage in OpenNebula is designed around the concept of datastores. A datastore is any storage medium to store disk images. OpenNebula distinguishes between three different datastore types:
- Images Datastore, which stores the base operating system images, persistent data volumes, CD-ROMs.
- System Datastore holds disks of running Virtual Machines. Disk are moved from/to the Images when the VMs are deployed/terminated.
- Files & Kernels Datastore to store plain files (not disk images), e.g. kernels, ramdisks, or contextualization files. See details here.
Image Datastores
- There are different Image Datastores depending on how the images are stored on the underlying storage technology:
- NFS/NAS
- Local Storage
- Ceph
- SAN
- Raw Device Mapping
- iSCSI - Libvirt, to access iSCSI devices through the built-in QEMU support
- NetApp - Datastore to register a NetApp SAN appliance, provided as an Enterprise Extension
System Datastores
Each datastore supports different features, here is a basic overview:
| NFS/NAS | Local | Ceph | SAN | iSCSI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Disk snapshots | yes | yes | yes | no | yes |
| VM snapshots | yes | yes | no | no | no |
| Live migration | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Fault tolerance (VM HA) | yes | no | yes | yes | yes |
NetApp SAN Datastore (EE)
The NetApp SAN Datastore is provided as an Enterprise Extension. Its basic features are listed below.
| Disk snapshots | yes |
| VM snapshots | no |
| Live migration | yes |
| Fault tolerance (VM HA) | yes |
How Should I Read This Chapter
Before reading this Chapter make sure you are familiar with Node Deployment from the Installation guide.
After that, proceed with the specific Datastore documentation you might be interested in.
Hypervisor Compatibility
This Chapter applies to KVM and LXC.
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