Volumes
Create and Attach a Volume
Volume creation is useful or attaching a data volume or a volume with users' home directories to an instance, as it is often good to separate the concerns of an operating system and user data. This makes it relatively easy to switch operating systems and maintain the same data, and to archive the more important parts of the project (the data) if needed.
Create
- Go to the "Volumes" tab in the OpenStack Web Interface
- Click the "Create Volume" button
- Enter a name and size
- Click "Create Volume"
Attach
- Go to the "Volumes" tab in the OpenStack Web Interface
- On the Actions dropdown menu for the volume you want to attach, select "Manage Attachments"
- Select the instance you wish to attach to and click "Attach Volume"
- Note that the device name specified is usually not important and not always adhered to
Once you have attached the volume
- For Linux: Once you have attached the volume, login to your instance and run
lsblk
to see which/dev/vdX
is the likely candidate (for some character 'X'). You can then edit/etc/fstab
to have this mounted; see standard Linux documentation for this and how to use themount
command. - For Windows - information coming soon
- For Linux: Once you have attached the volume, login to your instance and run
Snapshots of volumes (and of instances, in which case the volume is implicitly the root volume of the instance) can be created from the Actions dropwdown menu. This creates a state save of the existing volume. This is most useful for OS volumes to create safe checkpoints of working operating system configuration states. It may be less useful for larger data volumes; a more efficient solution might be to use ZFS snapshots on Linux operating systems.
Types of Storage
Information coming soon.