Key Concepts

A Manila share is the fundamental resource unit allocated by the Shared File System service. It represents an allocation of a persistent, readable, and writable filesystem that can be accessed by OpenStack compute instances, or clients outside of OpenStack (depending on deployment configuration). The underlying connection between the consumer of the share and the Manila service providing the share can be achieved with a variety of protocols, including NFS and CIFS (protocol support is dependent on the Manila driver deployed and the selection of the end user).

	Warning
	A Manila share is an abstract storage object that may or may not directly map to a "share" concept from the underlying backend provider of storage.

Manila shares can be identified uniquely through a UUID assigned by the Manila service at the time of share creation. A Manila share may also be optionally referred to by a human-readable name, though this string is not guaranteed to be unique within a single tenant or deployment of Manila.

The actual capacity provisioned in support of a Manila share resides on a single Manila backend within a single resource pool.

A Manila snapshot is a point-in-time, read-only copy of a Manila share. Snapshots can be created from an existing Manila share that is operational regardless of whether a client has mounted the file system. A Manila snapshot can serve as the content source for a new Manila share when the Manila share is created with the create from snapshot option specified.

A Manila backend is the configuration object that represents a single provider of resource pools upon which provisioning requests for shared file systems may be fulfilled. A Manila backend communicates with the storage system through a Manila driver. Manila supports multiple backends to be configured and managed simultaneously (even with the same Manila driver).

Note

A single Manila backend may be defined in the [DEFAULT] stanza of manila.conf; however, NetApp recommends that the enabled_share_backends configuration option be set to a comma-separated list of backend names, and each backend name have its own configuration stanza with the same name as listed in the enabled_share_backends option. Refer to the section called “Manila” for an example of the use of this option.

With the Kilo release of OpenStack, Manila has introduced the concept of "storage pools". The backend storage may present one or more logical storage resource pools from which Manila will select as a storage location when provisioning shares. In releases prior to Kilo, NetApp's Manila drivers contained some logic that determined which aggregate a Manila share would be placed into; with the introduction of pools, all scheduling logic is performed completely within the Manila scheduler.

	Important
	For NetApp's Manila drivers, a Manila storage pool is an aggregate defined within Data ONTAP.

A Manila driver is a particular implementation of a Manila backend that maps the abstract APIs and primitives of Manila to appropriate constructs within the particular storage solution underpinning the Manila backend.

Caution

The use of the term "driver" often creates confusion given common understanding of the behavior of “device drivers” in operating systems. The term can connote software that provides a data I/O path. In the case of Manila driver implementations, the software provides provisioning and other manipulation of storage devices but does not lay in the path of data I/O. For this reason, the term "driver" is often used interchangeably with the alternative (and perhaps more appropriate) term “provider”.

A Manila share type is an abstract collection of criteria used to characterize Manila shares. They are most commonly used to create a hierarchy of functional capabilities that represent a tiered level of storage services; for example, a cloud administrator might define a premium share type that indicates a greater level of performance than a basic share type, which would represent a best-effort level of performance.

The collection of criteria is specified as a list of key/value pairs, which are inspected by the Manila scheduler when determining which resource pools are able to fulfill a provisioning request. Individual Manila drivers (and subsequently Manila backends) may advertise arbitrary key/value pairs (also referred to as capabilities) to the Manila scheduler for each pool, which are then compared against share type definitions when determining which pool will fulfill a provisioning request.

Extra Spec.  An extra spec is a key/value pair, expressed in the style of key=value. Extra specs are associated with Manila share types, so that when users request shares of a particular share type, the shares are created on pools within storage backends that meet the specified criteria.

Note

The list of default capabilities that may be reported by a Manila driver and included in a share type definition include: share_backend_name: The name of the backend as defined in manila.conf vendor_name: The name of the vendor who has implemented the driver (e.g. NetApp) driver_version: The version of the driver (e.g. 1.0) storage_protocol: The protocol used by the backend to export block storage to clients (e.g. NFS_CIFS) For a table of NetApp supported extra specs, refer to Table 6.6, “NetApp supported Extra Specs for use with Manila Share Types”.

Share access rules define which clients can access a particular Manila share. Access rules can be declared for NFS shares by listing the valid IP networks (using CIDR notation) which should have access to the share. In the case of CIFS shares, the Windows security identifier (SID) can be specified.

	Important
	For NetApp's Manila drivers, share access is enforced through the use of export policies configured within the NetApp storage controller.

Security services are the concept in Manila that allow Finer-grained client access rules to be declared for authentication or authorization to access share content. External services including LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos can be declared as resources that should be consulted when making an access decision to a particular share. Shares can be associated to multiple security services.

A share network is an object that defines a relationship between a tenant's network/subnet (as defined in an OpenStack network service (Neutron or Nova-network)) and the Manila shares created by the same tenant; that is, a tenant may find it desirable to provision shares such that only instances connected to a particular OpenStack-defined network have access to the share.

	Note
	As of Kilo, share networks are no longer required arguments when creating shares.

A share server is a logical entity that manages the shares that are created on a specific share network. Depending on the implementation of a specific Manila driver, a share server may be a configuration object within the storage controller, or it may represent logical resources provisioned within an OpenStack deployment that are used to support the data path used to access Manila shares.

Share servers interact with network services to determine the appropriate IP addresses on which to export shares according to the related share network. Manila has a pluggable network model that allows share servers to work with OpenStack environments that have either Nova-Network or Neutron deployed. In addition, Manila contains an implementation of a standalone network plugin which manages a pool of IP addresses for shares that are defined in the manila.conf file. For more details on how share servers interact with the various network services, please refer to Figure 6.2, “Manila Workflow - Share Creation with Share Servers” and Figure 6.3, “Manila Workflow - Share Creation without Share Servers”.

Important

Within the NetApp Manila driver, a share server is defined to be a storage virtual machine (also known as a Vserver) within the clustered Data ONTAP system that is associated with a particular backend. The NetApp Manila driver has two operating "modes": One that supports the dynamic creation of share servers (SVMs) for each share network - this is referred to as the NetApp Manila driver with share server management. One that supports the reuse of a single share server (SVM) for all shares hosted from a backend - this is referred to as the NetApp Manila driver without share server management.