Local NAS storage/VM

[Praveen Rao]

Good morning.

I see that the Slice Builder has an option to add local NAS storage to a VM. However, when I tried to create a slice with NAS, it failed. Is this feature fully ready to use? Also, would you be able to update jupyter-examples-rel1.4.3/fabric_examples/native_api/benchmarking_storage.ipynb with more information? Currently, the Notebook says that “Network attached storage is not yet available on FABRIC. This notebook will be updated to when it becomes available.”

Thanks,

Praveen

[Paul Ruth]

Thanks. We will update that. It probably won’t be the default until the end of the semester so that we can keep everything stable for educational users.

[Ilya Baldin]

Praveen,

Persistent storage does work and is in use by a number of users. We will check what is going on with the portal provisioning, just be sure to use the correct sites and volume names – you have to remember that we allocate persistent storage ahead of time on the specific sites you request via the ticket system. If you try to use it on another site where this volume hasn’t been allocated, the provisioning will fail.

[Praveen Rao]

Hi Ilya,

I was referring to the local NAS feature for a VM that shows up in the Slice Builder. Essentially, we want to have ample ephemeral storage on a VM to store and process genome sequences using a cluster of VMs (say 8).

Yes, we do have persistent storage capability on some of the sites. But we can’t attach it to multiple VMs. Hence, local NAS is better for us.

Thanks,

Praveen

 

[Ilya Baldin]

Praveen,

The NAS is the persistent storage. There is no other option currently available. If you need persistent storage at more sites, please request it.

[Praveen Rao]

Hi Ilya,

I was told by the FABRIC team that persistent storage (gaf-storage) can be attached to only one VM.

I am curious about the NAS storage that shows up in Slice Builder. I can attach separate “rotating storage” to each VM. (See the attached screenshot.) I believe this is different from the persistent storage that we requested for a few sites. Please let me know if my understanding is right.

Thanks,

-Praveen

[Ilya Baldin]

Praveen,

NAS and persistent storage are the same thing. The portal expects the volume name to match that of the volume that was created for you. The reason it fails is because you do not have volumes ‘s1’ or ‘s2’ on whichever site you are using.

[Ilya Baldin]

If you want a volume available to multiple VMs in your slice, you may choose to create a VM that acts as e.g. NFS (or other type of network filesystem) server within a site using your pre-allocated persistent storage. Then you can mount it from your other VMs.

[Praveen Rao]

Got it. Thanks Ilya for the explanation.

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