Chameleon provides a shared file system service through the OpenStack Manila interface.
With the service, you can create a shared file system, mount to the bare metal instances, and manage some of its properties, such as visibility.
Hint
Chameleon shared file system service is currently backed by a CephFS. Same as our object store service, the data is
replicated and the replication should provide good availability in case of hardware failures.
Difference between shared file system and object store
You can choose either shared file system or object store to store, manage, and share your data with your collaborators. The object store
is suitable for storing large objects at scale, but isn’t suitable for transactional data, as objects are immutable and updated in their
entirety. Chameleon shared file system instead provides a NFS mount to the bare metal instances, with the NFS protocol managing locking
and data integrity processes required to provide multiple concurrent access to data.
The shared file system service is available at CHI@UC and CHI@TACC.
Each region has its own service and the shares created at one region are not available to the other. As all other Chameleon services, you can create
and manage your shares using both GUI and CLI.
To provide isolation among shares created by different projects, accessing a share requires a storage network, which are special networks you can
reserve to use. When reserving a storage network, add usage_type=storage to the resource properties. To learn more about reserving networks, read
the reservations documentation. All bare metal instances that are created on the storage network have access to all the project
shares.
Tip
To attach floating IP to your instance created on a storage network, you need to create a router with public external network. Then connect
the storage subnet to the router. You must specify an unused IP address which belongs to the selected subnet. To learn more about creating
router and connecting subnet, please read isolated network VLANs.
Shares are owned by the project. By default, all shares have private visibility and can only be listed and accessed within your project.
All bare metal instances owned by the project have read and write permissions to the project’s shares. You can also make your shares public.
All Chameleon users and projects can list public shares, and with a storage network, all projects have read-only access to a public share.
A share is a pre-allocated storage space at a CephFS. You can mount your shares to your bare metal instances via NFS protocol.
The accessibility of the shares are controlled internally by the reservation service. You are not allowed to edit the access rules of a share.
We do not charge SUs for the storage spaces of your shares. However, we do limit the total size and the number of shares you can create within
your project. The maximum number of shares is 10 and the maximum size allowed for all shares in a project is 2000 GiB. If you need to increase
the default quota, please submit a ticket via the Help Desk.
Click the Create Share button. In the Create Share dialog, provide a name and the size of your share, and then click the Create button to
create a share.
You can look at the details of a share by clicking the share name in the Shares page. Note that the paths of the export locations are important
as you will use this path to mount your share to your bare metal instances. You can also see the other properties, such as visibility and size.
The access rules are listed in the share details page, though you can not edit the rules, as they are controlled by the reservation service.
You can use the Action dropdown to delete a single share, or select multiple shares and click the Delete Shares button.
Important
Be careful when deleting shares, as the action is irreversible. However, the termination of your storage network reservation DOES NOT delete your share.
Your shares persist until you manually delete them.
The shares are independent of the storage networks. You can create shares any time regardless of the status of the storage networks.
The storage networks are only used to access your data stored in the share.
After your instance becomes active, find the export location path of the share using GUI or CLI.
To mount the share, run the following command:
