One of the overlooked issues with deploying a virtual appliance is network storage. Enterprises typically have their own high-end storage platforms, and are better served when an appliance can utilize them.
In this post, we’ll look at various storage options we’ve made available for our Jidoteki virtual appliances.
In the past…
The initial appliances built with Jidoteki only offered one storage option: local disk. All application data would be written to disk2 - a local disk with a fixed size. This was fine for most end-users, but it has some limitations which are difficult to work around.
We’ve included NFS utilities for quite some time, but manual SSH access was required to configure it, and it could not be used as the primary storage for the application.
Moving forward
In the last few weeks, we’ve added support to automatically connect the storage to an external NFS drive, configured directly through our open source Jidoteki Admin Dashboard UI (included in every appliance).
At the same time, we realized NFS was not representative of the various network storage platforms out there, so we decided to also add support for AoE (ATA-over-Ethernet), iSCSI, and NBD.
Each storage platform requires only a couple configuration parameters and is very easy to setup through the web UI. The end-user in an enterprise environment can integrate their appliance into existing backup and disaster recovery schemes without worrying about pre-provisioning large disk images for local storage.
This feature is already available and shipping for all our customers. If you’re interested in deploying real on-premises virtual appliances to enterprise customers, feel free to contact us so we can discuss your requirements.