Windows Server 2012 and Windows Storage Server 2012 offer an integrated iSCSI Target service that can be used with Cinder Volume in your stack. Being entirely a software solution, consider it in particular for mid sized networks where the costs of a SAN might be excessive.

One of the great advantages of integrating Windows solutions in the OpenStack ecosystem is the ease of management and deployment. Cinder is no exception as you will see right away.

All you need to start is a physical or virtual host running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Storage Server 2012 and a copy of our Cinder volume installer available for free here.

Here’s our welcome screen:

 

Once you get through the license and the folder selection screens, you will be asked for the cinder.conf options as in the following screenshot. The great advantage is that the installer will create all the configuration files for you, without having to look around for obscure options by yourself 🙂

 

The Windows iSCSI LUNs path is the folder where the Microsoft iSCSI Target Service will create a VHD for each volume, so it is best to choose an appropriate data partition if available.

The next step consist in providing the optional logging options:

That’s it! One last confirmation screen and the setup will start. Another great advantage of this setup is that it will take care of all the dependencies, including Python, the iSCSI Target Service, the cinder-volume Windows service and so on.

 

Once the setup is finished, the cinder-volume service will start and you can check the logs (in the path configured above) to see if the service is properly connected to your controller.

You can restart the service from the Windows Service GUI tool or via command line with:

To test your new volume server, you can connect to your OpenStack controller and create a simple volume:

This command creates a 1GB volume. You can now check the status of your new volume:

The Windows Cinder Volume driver works perfectly well with Nova on any Hypervisor, including support for the boot from volume feature. Great kudos go to Pedro Navarro Pérez who contributed the Windows volume driver to the Cinder project!