Storage

Storage

In the second drop-down of the main window tree, the storage infrastructure is shown. flexVDI Infrastructure supports three kinds of storage Objects:

• Image Storages
• Media Storages
• Direct Storages

Image Storage

The Image Storage objects are logical storage units.  Another way to see a Image Storage is like a like a container volumes. This Volumes store the virtual disks of the Guests. Each Image Storage is created in all selected Host.  

Clicking on one Image Storage, will show us information about it in the right area of the main screen. The following figure shows an example.

Under the "Host List" title, there is a list with the Hosts that can access this Image Storage. This detail is important because the Guests whose virtual disks (disk images from the perspective of Host) are housed in this Image Storage may run on any of these Hosts. This enables high availability of Guests.

Within an Image Storage you can create two types of Volumes.

Volume

Volumes (not external) are managed by the infrastructure.flexVDI software formats and mounts the discs. In return, the configuration possibilities are more limited.

External Volume

External Volumes are created and managed by the system Administrator, which gives them total flexibility.

System administrator has to connect to the Hosts, and using the tools provided by the operating system or hardware manufacturer, or other third party, connects, formats, and mounts storage in the Hosts.

After completing the configuration and mounting the storage hardware, you can create an External Volume on it, which will allow flexVDI to create virtual disks on it.

If you are configuring a cluster to enable Guests to run on more than Host, all of these Hosts must access the storage on the same path (mount point). That mount point is the one entered in flexVDI Dashboard .

Media Storages

Media Storages are repositories of ISO image files. These files can be mounted as disks by Guests and are useful for the initial installation of the OS, and more. When clicking on a Media Storage, information about it will be displayed in the right area. The following figure shows the displayed information.

They are storage space provided by the Hosts, just as Volumes, but they store:

• Read-only images that will be seen as optical units by the Guest (files in ISO format)
• Files with full exported virtual machines in flexVDI format (files with .fvm extensión).
  

From a technical point of view, they are shares accessed by CIFS/SMB. The values son in the figure, "IP address", "Path" and "User name", are respectively the IP / hostname of the machine serving the CIFS share, the path of the share, and the user that flexVDI uses to connect to resource.

Hosts listed under "Host list" are those which will mount the share and have access to the Media Storage.

Direct Storages

Direct Storage provides Guests direct access to the physical disks. Clicking on a Direct Storage, will show information about it in the area on the right. The following figure shows the information.

The Direct Storage provides improved performance by eliminating the middle layer of storage virtualization, at the cost of its additional functionality (easy copy, incremental disks, ...)