OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook

Chapter 8. Nova Volumes

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Configuring nova-volume services
• Configuring OpenStack Compute for nova-volume
• Creating volumes
• Attaching volumes to instances
• Detaching volumes from an instance
• Deleting volumes

Introduction

Data written to currently running instances on disks is not persistent—meaning that when you terminate such instances, any disk writes will be lost. Volumes are persistent storage that you can attach to your running OpenStack Compute instances; the best analogy is that of a USB drive that you can attach to an instance. Like USB drives, you can only attach instances to one computer at a time. Nova Volumes are very similar to Amazon EC2's Elastic Block Storage—the difference is how these are presented to the running ...