Antsle Distributed Storage - ADS

If you want:

  • Highly-available, resilient storage

  • Access to your data across your Antsle servers

  • Software that runs smoothly, even if portions of your cluster go down

then ADS is right for you!

What You'll Need

  • At least three Antsle servers with at least two drives each

  • antMan Grow+ for each Antsle server

  • 1G Ethernet switch with a connection to each Antsle server (Make sure to activate the NIC in the Networks page)

Make sure that each Antsle server has a unique hostname, as the hostname plays an important part in uniquely identifying each node. i.e. Don't leave your antsle's name myantsle. See this guide to change the name of your Antsle server.

ADS - Installation

Navigate to the Settings page.

Under Storage Settings flip the switch for ADS.

Follow the prompts through the configuration process

Overview

Select Nodes

Add Node - Add a node to the cluster.

Nodes

Name

Description

Node

Name of the node

Include?

Select whether or not the node will be included into the cluster

Configure Nodes

Name

Description

Node

Name of the node

IP Address

IP Address ADS will use to make connections. The IP address selected should be the IP address assigned to the port connected to the 10G Ethernet switch.

Device

Block device to be managed by ADS

The block device chosen will be wiped, so make sure that any important data on each block device selected is backed up. If the device chosen is used by ZFS to create a mirror, this mirror will be unset, and ADS will wipe and manage the drive. If the device chosen is an NVMe, the L2 Arch caching will be disabled, and ADS will manage the NVMe.

Once you've gone through the configuration steps, antMan will install ADS in the background. To check the status of the ADS installation, check the Jobs menu at the top-right of the screen.

Do not get an InstantSSL for any of the nodes in the ADS cluster as the nginx configuration will intercept the ADS cluster communication.

If you lose communication with antMan run the following command on the antsle's command line:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=3000/tcp

ADS Drives

With ADS installed, you can create ADS Drives. ADS Drives are highly-available, distributed filesystems that can be mounted from multiple antlets. Saving data to this filesystem on any one antlet will be available for all other mounted antlets to access. Data in an ADS Drive will be available, even if some portion of the Antsle servers are down.

Add ADS Drive

Click + Create to Create an ADS Drive

Name

Description

Name

Name of the ADS Drive

Size

Size of the ADS Drive. If 0 is chosen, no size limit will be configured, and ADS will store data on the ADS Drive until there is no more available space.

Edit ADS Drive

Click the Edit button to Edit an ADS Drive

Name

Description

Name

Name of the ADS Drive

Size

Size of the ADS Drive. If 0 is chosen, no size limit will be configured, and ADS will store data on the ADS Drive until there is no more available space.

Delete ADS Drive

Click Delete to Delete an ADS Drive

Click Yes, Delete this ADS Drive! to confirm deletion.

Mounting an ADS Drive

In order to mount an ADS Drive, an antlet must be able to access the ADS cluster. For example, if an ADS cluster is in the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet, then the antlet where you'd like to mount the ADS Drive must also be in that subnet. To accomplish this, see this guide on how to create and configure a Virtual NIC.

After a Virtual NIC is configured, and the default gateway is set appropriately, you can mount the ADS Drive using the following command:

mount -t ceph 192.168.0.9:6789:/test-drive /mnt/

replacing:

Example

Description

192.168.0.9

IP address of any node in the cluster

test-drive

name of the ADS Drive you want to mount

/mnt/

mountpoint of your choice inside the antlet

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