Does OpenStack need s to have shared storage

0
votes

I'm new to OpenStack. Reading its documents I feel some of its features may need shared storages like SAN Storage. For example, the following paragraph says:

Block Storage

The optional Block Storage node contains the disks that the Block Storage and Shared File System services provision for instances.

For simplicity, service traffic between compute nodes and this node uses the management network. Production environments should implement a separate storage network to increase performance and security.

You can deploy more than one block storage node. Each node requires a minimum of one network interface.

We have 4 servers that run some Big Data components like Apache Hadoop, Kafka, and Spark. We use virtual machines to run different components and the storage is just the server's local storage. We don't use any SAN Storage. So in such an environment (that we have no shared storage), can we use OpenStack's features?

1
bigdataopenstack

1 Answers

1
votes

There is no direct requirement to have shared storage to run Openstack, and if you are only using the most common Openstack components (e.g. nova, glance, neutron) you have nothing to worry about.

There may however be some components that assume that you have shared storage, and you may need to specifically disable it by configuration, or in some cases make modifications to the base templates for those components to work.