Disks

Contents

• Disks
  • Current state and shortcomings
  • Proposed changes
  • Design decisions
    • Disks as config top-level citizens
      • Disk representation
      • Get instance’s disks
      • Configuration changes
      • Apply Disk modifications
      • Backend changes

This is a design document detailing the implementation of disks as a new top-level citizen in the config file (just like instances, nodes etc).

Current state and shortcomings

Currently, Disks are stored in Ganeti’s config file as a list (container) of Disk objects under the Instance in which they belong. This implementation imposes a number of limitations:

• A Disk object cannot live outside an Instance. This means that one cannot detach a disk from an instance (without destroying the disk) and then reattach it (to the same or even to a different instance).
• Disks are not taggable objects, as only top-level citizens of the config file can be made taggable. Having taggable disks will allow for further customizations.

Proposed changes

The implementation is going to be split in four parts:

• Make disks a top-level citizen in config file. The Instance object will no longer contain a list of Disk objects, but a list of disk UUIDs.
• Add locks for Disk objects and make them taggable.
• Allow to attach/detach an existing disk to/from an instance.
• Allow creation/modification/deletion of disks that are not attached to any instance (requires new LUs for disks).

Design decisions

Disks as config top-level citizens

The first patch-series is going to add a new top-level citizen in the config object (namely disks) and separate the disk objects from the instances. In doing so there are a number of problems that we have to overcome:

• How the Disk object will be represented in the config file and how it is going to be connected with the instance it belongs to.
• How the existing code will get the disks belonging to an instance.
• What it means for a disk to be attached/detached to/from an instance.
• How disks are going to be created/deleted, attached/detached using the existing code.

Disk representation

The Disk object gets two extra slots, _TIMESTAMPS and serial_no.

The Instance object will no longer contain the list of disk objects that are attached to it. Instead, an Instance object will refer to its disks using their UUIDs. Since the order in which the disks are attached to an instance is important we are going to have a list of disk UUIDs under the Instance object which will denote the disks attached to the instance and their order at the same time. So the Instance’s disks slot is going to be a list of disk UUIDs. The Disk object is not going to have a slot pointing to the Instance in which it belongs since this is redundant.

Get instance’s disks

A new function GetInstanceDisks will be added to the config that given an instance will return a list of Disk objects with the disks attached to this instance. This list will be exactly the same as ‘instance.disks’ was before. Everywhere in the code we are going to replace the ‘instance.disks’ (which from now one will contain a list of disk UUIDs) with the function GetInstanceDisks.

Since disks will not be part of the Instance object any more, ‘all_nodes’ and ‘secondary_nodes’ can not be Instance‘s properties. Instead we will use the functions GetInstanceNodes and GetInstanceSecondaryNodes from the config to compute these values.

Configuration changes

The ConfigData object gets one extra slot: disks. Also there will be two new functions, AddDisk and RemoveDisk that will create/remove a disk objects from the config.

The VerifyConfig function will be changed so it can check that there are no dangling pointers from instances to disks (i.e. an instance points to a disk that doesn’t exist in the config).

The ‘upgrade’ operation for the config should check if disks are top level citizens and if not it has to extract the disk objects from the instances and replace them with their uuids. In case of the ‘downgrade’ operation (where disks will be made again part of the Instance object) all disks that are not attached to any instance at all will be ignored (removed from config).

Apply Disk modifications

There are four operations that can be performed to a Disk object:

• Create a new Disk object and save it to the config.
• Remove an existing Disk object from the config.
• Attach an existing Disk to an existing Instance.
• Detach an existing Disk from an existing Instance.

The first two operations will be performed using the config functions AddDisk and RemoveDisk respectively where the last two operations will be performed using the functions AttachInstanceDisk and DetachInstanceDisk.

Since Ganeti doesn’t allow for a Disk object to not be attached anywhere (for now) we will create two wrapper functions (namely AddInstanceDisk and RemoveInstanceDisk) which will add and attach a disk at the same time (respectively detach and remove a disk).

In addition since Ganeti doesn’t allow for a Disk object to be attached to more than one Instance at once, when attaching a disk to an instance we have to make sure that the disk is not attached anywhere else.

Backend changes

The backend needs access to the disks of an Instance but doesn’t have access to the GetInstanceDisks function from the config file. Thus we will create a new Instance slot (namely disks_info) that will get annotated (during RPC) with the instance’s disk objects. So in the backend we will only have to replace the disks slot with disks_info.