This is the first in a series of posts about using ZFS as a cloud store for your S3 bucket, or your OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) bucket in your datacenter.
I am going to walk through in the next few posts how to utilize a ZFS appliance as a cloud store.
There maybe a number of reasons why you might want to do this. Maybe you want to learn more about using cloud buckets for storage, or maybe you are already familiar with the the concept, and you want to jump right in.
As my starting point for this I am going to go through how I configured this in my home office lab so you can too.. That is provided that you have enough hardware sitting around to set it up.
Step 1 : Download an Virtual box.
If you haven't worked with virtualbox yet, now is a good time to get started. In order to go through and emulate what I am explaining, you are going to need at least 1 virtualbox environment for the ZFS emulator, and a second environment (virtual or bare metal) for a DB server. Virtual box will allow you to download an image (which includes the software install) and start it up immediately. This saves a lot of time and trouble in downloading and configuring an environment (patches, libraries, settings) etc.
Step 2 : Download Database image, and ZFS image
At a bare minimum to go through my demo, you will need 2 environments, The ZFS environment must be a virtual image, but the DB environment is up to you. Below are the 2 Virtual Box images to get you started
VB 1 : Database Virtual Box Appliance / Virtual Machine. DB Version 19.3 (as of writing)
VB 2 : Oracle ZFS Storage Simulator. Version 8.8 (as of writing)
Step 3: Patch ZFS image to latest release.
This can be done by downloading the latest patch from My Oracle support, and applying it to the running ZFS image. This is critical for the ZFS image, as there have been recent patches to to make these features work seamlessly.
At the end of completing these 3 steps, you will have a ZFS Simulator running on at least release 8.26 (the current release as of writing) , and a database running release 19.3 (mine is running 19.6)
FULL DISCLOSURE : Since I use my DB host for a lot of other testing, I am actually executing my demos on a bare metal environment using OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) and DB version 19.6.
In this first post I am going to go through the steps to configure my ZFS simulator to present itself with both an S3 bucket and an OCI bucket.
From there I will write 2 more posts on setting up security, connecting to the buckets, and backing up my database.
For documentation, these are few of the places I found start with.
- ZFS Appliance 8.8 "Getting started with an S3 object API service"
- ZFS Appliance Object API guild for Amazon S3 service support.
- ZFS Appliance enabling the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure object service
Step 4: Configure the storage pool and share.
To make it easy, I created one big storage pool "mypool" Double Parity. I used 10 disks, and the pool is around 35 GB. Enough to perform some simple tests with. I also created a single share "myshare" using all the default values.
Step 5: Enable S3 and OCI services.
I logged onto the ZFS storage console through my web browser as root, using the IP address I assigned during the first startup, and the password I entered during the first startup of the VB image .
Start by going to the services page for the appliance with "Configuration --> Services"
On this page you will notice that the "HTTP" service (under Data services) is greyed out and disabled.
Click on the "power button" to enable the service.
Once the service starts, it will appear green like other online Data Services.
Now click on the "HTTP" itself bringing up the configuration screen.
First let's enable S3 for the appliance.
Note: under HTTP, I clicked on the S3 tab bringing up the screen below.
Click on "Enable S3" and press the "APPLY" button in the top right under "Logs".
Next let's enable OCI for the appliance.
Note: under HTTP, I clicked on the S3 tab bringing up the screen below.
Click on "Enable OCI" and press the "APPLY" button in the top right under "Logs".
You can see below that I changed both the "S3 API Mode" and the "OCI API Mode" from "None" to "Read/Write" and applied the changes.
You can also see the URL from the project level
S3 : http://10.0.0.115/s3/v1/export/
OCI : http://10.0.0.115/oci/n/export/
When I look at the share and the protocol setting, I can see the HTTP settings are inherited from the project, and my S3 and OCI bucket URLs are shown on the page.
You can also see the URL from the share level (inherited from the project)
S3 : http://10.0.0.115/s3/v1/export/myshare
OCI : http://10.0.0.115/oci/n/export/myshare
That's all there is to configuring my ZFS appliance to act as a cloud store for both S3 buckets and OCI buckets.
My next 2 posts (I am reserving the spots here to add the links later) will cover.
- Configuring authentication for S3 and OCI in a ZFS object store.
- Accessing the object store through ocicli and Cloudberry