Image storage planning¶

The OpenStack Image service (Glance) provides a REST API for storing and managing virtual machine images and snapshots. Glance requires you to configure a back end for storing images.

MCP supports the following options as Glance back end:

Ceph cluster

A highly scalable distributed object storage that is recommended as an Image storage for environments with a large number of images and/or snapshots. If used as a back end for both image storage and ephemeral storage, Ceph can eliminate caching of images on compute nodes and enable copy-on-write of disk images, which in large clouds can save a lot of storage capacity.

GlusterFS

A distributed network file system that allows you to create a reliable and redundant data storage for image files. This is the default option for an Image store with the File back end in MCP.

The default back end used in Mirantis Reference Architecture is Ceph cluster.