We are pleased to announce that our new Abiquo 2.2 release includes a new integration with Nexenta Storage. With this integration, the engineering team has resolved a long-term technical debt.
Abiquo’s external storage capabilities can be enabled in two different ways:
- The most common and recommended approach is to have a storage plugin for the Abiquo Storage System Manager that uses the target storage device’s management API to manage iSCSI volumes (block devices).
- The alternative is to use an Abiquo storage agent installed on the target storage device. This approach is used for devices that do not expose a management API, such as LVM. The Abiquo Storage Manager performs all operations against the storage agent.
When Abiquo began work on a storage plugin for Nexenta integration, we decided to adapt our OpenSolaris/ZFS agent to run on Nexenta. Meanwhile, the Nexenta team was preparing an API to fully manage their storage technology. So we then decided to do things better and refactor the existing storage integration to use the new REST API and thus avoid an extra component in the architecture between the Storage System Manager and the storage device.
This integration is now available in Abiquo 2.2, and it comes with a completely refactored and open source Storage Management interface (more about this in upcoming posts!).
Abiquo now supports Nexenta from version 3.0.3, but Nexenta Community versions prior to 3.1.3 may not work, because they do not ship with the iSCSI plugin, which is a basic requirement for the Abiquo external storage features.
Nexenta is based on ZFS technology and we feel it is a very good option for our customers because of its high performance capabilities in relation to its cost, so we will continue to support this product. And we hope you will be satisfied with the result!