Manila System Architecture

The Shared File Systems service is intended to be ran on one or more nodes.

Manila uses a sql-based central database that is shared by all manila services in the system. The amount and depth of the data fits into a sql database quite well. For small deployments this seems like an optimal solution. For larger deployments, and especially if security is a concern, manila will be moving towards multiple data stores with some kind of aggregation system.

Components

Below you will a brief explanation of the different components.

                                                    /- ( LDAP )
                                [ Auth Manager ] ---
                                       |            \- ( DB )
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[ Web Dashboard ]- manilaclient -[ manila-api ] -- < AMQP > -- [ manila-scheduler ] -- [ manila-share ] -- ( shared filesystem )
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                                    < REST >

• DB: sql database for data storage. Used by all components (LINKS NOT SHOWN)
• Web Dashboard: external component that talks to the api. Beta extended Horizon available here: https://github.com/NetApp/horizon/tree/manila
• manila-api
• Auth Manager: component responsible for users/projects/and roles. Can backend to DB or LDAP. This is not a separate binary, but rather a python class that is used by most components in the system.
• manila-scheduler
• manila-share

Further Challenges

• More efficient share/snapshot size calculation
• Create a notion of “attached” shares with automation of mount operations
• Support for Nova-network as an alternative to Neutron
• Support for standalone operation (no dependency on Neutron/Nova-network)
• Allow admin-created share-servers and share-networks to be used by multiple tenants
• Support creation of new subnets for share servers (to connect VLANs with VXLAN/GRE/etc)
• Gateway mediated networking model with NFS-Ganesha
• Add support for more backends