In first Post of this series, I explained what is VCD Object Storage Extension solution/service and discussed about high level architecture of the same. In this post I will walk through prepping infrastructure for object storage extension implementation.

Note: This blog series is only focussed on cloudian implementation.

There are two choices for implementing cloudian object storage:

1: Software-Defined Storage: Deploy Cloudian software on your existing VMware compute and storage platform. In this mode you install cloudian binary on supported RHEL/CentOS machine. This machine can run as a VM or directly on bare metal servers.

2: Appliance: Deploy as a pre-configured storage appliance from Cloudian.

For Lab/POC purpose, option 1 is the preferred choice. 

Following prerequisites must be completed before starting cloudian implementation.

1: Deploy a CentOS (7.4 or later) VM

Deploy centos vm with below specifications for cloudian install:

• vCPU: 4
• vRAM: 16 GB
• vDISk: 20 GB (OS), 350 GB (data)
• NIC’s (optional): 2 (One for management and one for storage traffic)

Do not create any partition on disk 2 during centos install. Cloudian software will do this automatically during install. 

Note: Ideal implementation of cloudian needs 3 nodes atleast for HA and Load balancer. In my lab I have a single node implementation.

2: Configure DNS

Create following DNS entries:

• S3 service endpoint: s3-<region>.<your-domain>, e.g: s3-blr.vstellar.local
• S3 static website service endpoint: s3-website-<region>.<your-domain>
• Admin Service endpoint: s3-admin.<your-domain>
• Cloudian Management Console (CMC) domain: cmc.<your-domain>
• IAM endpoint: iam.<domain-name>

Although cloudian documentation talks about creating following wildcard dns names, I did not used this in my implementation.

• S3 static website endpoint wildcard: *.s3-website-<region>.<yourdomain>
• S3 service endpoint wildcard: *.s3-<region>.<your-domain>

I am using lightweight DNS service dnsmasq in my lab and this is how my /etc/host file looks like:

[root@dns ~]# cat /etc/hosts | grep 192.168.201.71
192.168.201.71 cloudian01.rp1.vmw s3-blr.rp1.vmw s3-website-blr.rp1.vmw s3-admin.rp1.vmw cmc.rp1.vmw iam.rp1.vmw 

3: Disable Firewall Services

Following services needs to be disabled on all centos vm where cloudian will be installed.

4: Verify Python Version

Make sure your centos 7 vm that you have created in step 1, have python 2.7.x installed.

5: Cloudian Binary Package & License

Cloudian installer is shipped as bin package and current version of cloudian (7.2.1) can be downloaded from Here

License for cloudian can be obtained via registering on cloudian website and working with cloudian sales rep for trial license.

And that concludes this post. In next post of this series, I will walk through steps of installing cloudian hyperstore. Stay tuned!!!

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