Dot Hill AssuredSAN Fibre Channel and iSCSI drivers

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The DotHillFCDriver and DotHillISCSIDriver Cinder drivers allow Dot Hill arrays to be used for block storage in OpenStack deployments.

System requirements

To use the Dot Hill drivers, the following are required:

Dot Hill AssuredSAN array with:
- iSCSI or FC host interfaces
- G22x firmware or later
- Appropriate licenses for the snapshot and copy volume features
Network connectivity between the OpenStack host and the array management interfaces
HTTPS or HTTP must be enabled on the array

Supported operations

Create, delete, attach, and detach volumes.
Create, list, and delete volume snapshots.
Create a volume from a snapshot.
Copy an image to a volume.
Copy a volume to an image.
Clone a volume.
Extend a volume.
Migrate a volume with back-end assistance.
Retype a volume.
Manage and unmanage a volume.

Configuring the array

Verify that the array can be managed via an HTTPS connection. HTTP can also be used if dothill_api_protocol=http is placed into the appropriate sections of the cinder.conf file.
Confirm that virtual pools A and B are present if you plan to use virtual pools for OpenStack storage.
If you plan to use vdisks instead of virtual pools, create or identify one or more vdisks to be used for OpenStack storage; typically this will mean creating or setting aside one disk group for each of the A and B controllers.
Edit the cinder.conf file to define an storage backend entry for each storage pool on the array that will be managed by OpenStack. Each entry consists of a unique section name, surrounded by square brackets, followed by options specified in key=value format.
- The dothill_backend_name value specifies the name of the storage pool or vdisk on the array.
- The volume_backend_name option value can be a unique value, if you wish to be able to assign volumes to a specific storage pool on the array, or a name that's shared among multiple storage pools to let the volume scheduler choose where new volumes are allocated.
- The rest of the options will be repeated for each storage pool in a given array: the appropriate Cinder driver name; IP address or hostname of the array management interface; the username and password of an array user account with manage privileges; and the iSCSI IP addresses for the array if using the iSCSI transport protocol.
In the examples below, two backends are defined, one for pool A and one for pool B, and a common volume_backend_name is used so that a single volume type definition can be used to allocate volumes from both pools.
Example 2.5. iSCSI example backend entries
```
[pool-a]
dothill_backend_name = A
volume_backend_name = dothill-array
volume_driver = cinder.volume.drivers.dothill.dothill_iscsi.DotHillISCSIDriver
san_ip = 10.1.2.3
san_login = manage
san_password = !manage
dothill_iscsi_ips = 10.2.3.4,10.2.3.5

[pool-b]
dothill_backend_name = B
volume_backend_name = dothill-array
volume_driver = cinder.volume.drivers.dothill.dothill_iscsi.DotHillISCSIDriver
san_ip = 10.1.2.3
san_login = manage
san_password = !manage
dothill_iscsi_ips = 10.2.3.4,10.2.3.5
```
Example 2.6. Fibre Channel example backend entries
```
[pool-a]
dothill_backend_name = A
volume_backend_name = dothill-array
volume_driver = cinder.volume.drivers.dothill.dothill_fc.DotHillFCDriver
san_ip = 10.1.2.3
san_login = manage
san_password = !manage

[pool-b]
dothill_backend_name = B
volume_backend_name = dothill-array
volume_driver = cinder.volume.drivers.dothill.dothill_fc.DotHillFCDriver
san_ip = 10.1.2.3
san_login = manage
san_password = !manage
```
If any volume_backend_name value refers to a vdisk rather than a virtual pool, add an additional statement dothill_backend_type = linear to that backend entry.
If HTTPS is not enabled in the array, include dothill_api_protocol = http in each of the backend definitions.
If HTTPS is enabled, you can enable certificate verification with the option dothill_verify_certificate=True. You may also use the dothill_verify_certificate_path parameter to specify the path to a CA_BUNDLE file containing CAs other than those in the default list.
Modify the [DEFAULT] section of the cinder.conf file to add an enabled_backends parameter specifying the backend entries you added, and a default_volume_type parameter specifying the name of a volume type that you will create in the next step.
Example 2.7. [DEFAULT] section changes
```
[DEFAULT]
  ...
enabled_backends = pool-a,pool-b
default_volume_type = dothill
  ...
```
Create a new volume type for each distinct volume_backend_name value that you added to cinder.conf. The example below assumes that the same volume_backend_name=dothill-array option was specified in all of the entries, and specifies that the volume type dothill can be used to allocate volumes from any of them.

Example 2.8. Creating a volume type
$ cinder type-create dothill
$ cinder type-key dothill set volume_backend_name=dothill-array
After modifying cinder.conf, restart the cinder-volume service.

Driver-specific options

The following table contains the configuration options that are specific to the Dot Hill drivers.

Table 2.5. Description of Dot Hill volume driver configuration options
Configuration option = Default value	Description
[DEFAULT]
`dothill_api_protocol` = `https`	(StrOpt) DotHill API interface protocol.
`dothill_backend_name` = `A`	(StrOpt) Pool or Vdisk name to use for volume creation.
`dothill_backend_type` = `virtual`	(StrOpt) linear (for Vdisk) or virtual (for Pool).
`dothill_iscsi_ips` =	(ListOpt) List of comma-separated target iSCSI IP addresses.
`dothill_verify_certificate` = `False`	(BoolOpt) Whether to verify DotHill array SSL certificate.
`dothill_verify_certificate_path` = `None`	(StrOpt) DotHill array SSL certificate path.

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