Volumes

The dashboard page is located under the Manage Compute -> Volumes page, where you can manage aspects of your volumes including creating, attaching (mounting), creating a snapshot, and deleting volumes.

Viewing Volumes
Once you have logged into the DreamCompute dashboard, click the Volumes tab in the left-hand panel under Manage Compute.


 * The Volumes page appears.


 * [[File:Volumes.png]]

What are volumes?
Volumes are additional storage that can be attacked to your instances. These volumes are different from a | SAN or | NFS, where you can attach a volume to multiple systems or instances at a time. With the OpenStack Block Storage service, it is possible to attach a volume to only one instance at a time.

Uses
Volumes can be used to separate a user or application data from the operating system volume, so snapshots contain only the data you want. Volumes can have snapshots created, and a snapshot can be used to make a new volume, but this is not a recommended method for replication or duplicating data for use on multiple instances.

Types
We only offer Ceph backed storage on DreamCompute, so the "Type" drop-down remains empty. Other types not supported would be ephemeral (local) storage on the hypervisors.

=Manage Volumes=

Creating a Volume

 * [[file:VolumesCreate.fw.png]]


 * [[file:VolumesCreateButton.fw.png]]


 * When all the details have been entered into the settings tabs, click the CREATE VOLUME button to finish.

Managing Attachments

 * [[file:VolumesEditAttachments.fw.png]]

The device name specified currently does not work (see Known Issues) and will choose the next available letter alphabetically.

Once your volume is attached, you can check the "dmesg" command on your instance for the device name. It will look like this for example:

[   2.619959]  vdb: unknown partition table

This warning is normal, as the volume has no partition table and needs to be formatted. You can format it with the file system of your choice with the appropriate command (mkfs.ext2 mkfs.ext3 mkfs.ext4 etc) by specifying the partition name:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdb

To mount it, make sure the directory you want to mount it to exists and run:

mount /dev/vdb /YOUR/DESIRED/PATH

The entry can be added to the /etc/fstab file if you want it mounted on boot, and you can unmount it via:

umount /YOUR/DESIRED/PATH

Using Commands in the Actions Column
The following is a description of the commands you see under the Actions column for each Volume.

To access the following commands, click MORE which opens a drop-down menu:


 * [[file:VolumesMenu.fw.png]]

Description of commands from the MORE drop-down menu

 * CREATE SNAPSHOT
 * This initiates a snapshot that is created from the instances volume.


 * DELETE VOLUME
 * Deletes a volume.