Openstack IceHouse - Cinder NFS versus ISCSI - Snapshot on FAS3250 cluster mode

[REDOUANELIANI]

Hi all,

I used the feature snaphsot from openstack version ICEHOUSE on cinder configured with NFS driver for Netapp cluster-mode.

That's work but for sometime we encounter some issue of performance with the FAS when there are many snapshot launched simultanously.

Snapshot takes more time to finish and the CPU of the FAS approximates 98 %.

I was advised to use the driver iscsi for netapp that would improve performance due to that the snapshot will be done bu the netapp.

The driver iscsi send a request to FAS in order to do the snapshot by herself.

May you confirm me please if i use the iscsi driver that i gain performance and the snapshot will be done by the FAS ?

In any case i have to do the test with iscsi.

Could you help me please to configure the iscsi on the netapp and Openstack...

-From Netapp : I set the license iscsi and create a iscsi vserver with an aggregate and a LUN

Sould i configure the initiator group ? 

- From Openstack : Should i start the iscsi service or no need because that's the driver iscsi who manage the FAS with API ?

Thanks for your reply.

[dcain]

What version of Data ONTAP are we referring to here?  How many FlexVols do you have presented to Cinder in your environment?  How many concurrent snapshots are we talking about here?

Cinder snapshots are implemented as Data ONTAP file or lun clones versus Data ONTAP snapshots.  Rapid cloning support for Cinder snapshots is available for both NFS and iSCSI with our Unified Cinder driver.  With that being said, performance optimizations in this area have been made in later versions of Data ONTAP, hence my first question above.

With respect on how to setup and utilize portions of the NetApp Unified Cinder driver to work with iSCSI, head over to the Deployment and Operations Guide here for more guidance:

NetApp Unified Driver for Clustered Data ONTAP with iSCSI

Data ONTAP Configuration

[REDOUANELIANI]

Thanks for your reply  and sorry for my late answer.

We use a FAS3250 with 8.2.3P6 version on cdot and 2 volumes cinder on each node 

Our customer use snapshot NOVA for many VM which sollicited much IOPS and CPU.

when i asked my question i did not how snapshot cinder works and what is the best solution iscsi or nfs for cinder.

But i tested snapshot cinder on our platform,it's very fast and instantaneous and use the flexclone licence (file for nfs and lun for iscsi).

We'll try to advise our customer to use cinder snapshot better than nova and for my point of view i have a preference for nfs due to limitation of iscsi.

However, for daily activity (independently of snapshots)  i would be very interested if you had a feedback about iscsi versus nfs about performance,latency ?