Storage Capacity Balance Strategy

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/watcher/+spec/storage-capacity-balance

As of now, Watcher optimizes only compute nodes. Storage optimization is also an important feature for centralized storage (non distributed storage).

This spec will add Storage Capacity Balance Strategy to balance the storage capacity, which can be also considered a way to balance the storage workload. And we can use existing goal(workload_balancing) and action(volume_migrate) for this storage capacity balance.

Problem description

In current Data Center, the capacity of storage back-end may be not balanced, some are extremely high, some are idle. This situation will degrade the performance of I/O Read/Write, which will finally affect the QoS. This problem can be solved by storage capacity balance strategy.

This strategy migrates volumes based on the capacity utilization of the cinder pools. It makes decision to migrate a volume whenever a pool’s capacity utilization % is higher than the specified threshold. The migration of a volume should make the capacity utilization of the pool where it locates lower than the storage capacity utilization threshold.

Use Cases

As an administrator, I want to be able to trigger an audit that controls the storage capacity utilization below a certain threshold.

Proposed change

  • Extend base strategy classes to add one new strategy - ” Storage Capacity Balance Strategy”

  • Use Cinder client to get all volumes with status in available or in-use and no snapshots, and to get all pools except the pools listed as exclude_pools in the configuration file.

  • Group volume pools into two categories: underload or overload pools according to threshold:

    under_pools = list(filter(lambda p: float(p.total_capacity_gb) -
float(p.free_capacity_gb) < float(p.total_capacity_gb) * threshold, pools))

over_pools = list(filter(lambda p: float(p.total_capacity_gb) -
float(p.free_capacity_gb) >= float(p.total_capacity_gb) * threshold, pools))

  • Determine migrate_volumes, source pools and destination pools based on some factors:

    • whether a volume is mounted to a VM

    • volume size,

    • whether a volume is a mirrored volume

    • priority

Alternatives

None

Data model impact

None

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

None

Performance Impact

None

Other deployer impact

None

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Primary assignee:

<yumeng-bao>,<li-canwei2>

Work Items

  1. Define proper threshold

  2. Write the execute function to locate pool overloaded

  3. Function to generate actions:volume_migrate or volume_retype.

Dependencies

None

Testing

Unit and functional test are needed.

Documentation Impact

Add docs on how to use this strategy.

References

None

History

None