Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0 - Creating a Block Storage Volume

This is the third in a series of short tutorials showing how to perform common cloud operations tasks in Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0 – Mirantis’ “Private Cloud as a Service”

In our last tutorial, we learned how to launch a VM instance from a boot image. Now, we’ll start examining how Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0 lets us manage block storage for VMs. By managing storage volumes and instances separately, we can create reusable building blocks for applications. In this segment, we’ll create a block storage volume.

Step by Step

To create a new block storage volume, we’ll use Mirantis OpenStack Express Horizon -- we’ll go to Projects -> Volumes -> Create Volume and pull up the dialog.

Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0 lets you easily create block storage volumes and manage them separately from instances. By creating, attaching, modifying and snapshotting storage volumes, you can create a library of building blocks for applications.

Name your volume, then -- ignoring the Type field -- specify the size in GB. As you can see, Mirantis OpenStack Express/Horizon keeps track of your usage, and the number of volumes you’ve defined.

You can specify the contents of a volume by uploading an .iso image. But since this is a new volume, we’ll create it empty.

We’ll add the volume to the nova-compute availability zone, so we can attach it to instances running there, like our Cirros VM.

Once the volume is created, you can see it in the Volumes table.

You can keep track of all the volumes you've created in Horizon's Volumes table.

Now that we know how to create a volume, our next video will explore attaching it to an instance, configuring it for use, and using snapshots to store its state.

Resources:

• Mirantis OpenStack Express 2.0 Documentation
• Mirantis OpenStack Express Operations Guide
• OpenStack Documentation: Create and Manage Volumes

Check out Express for yourself at https://express.mirantis.com.