Add a `linstor` storage driver

[stgraber]

Adding this as its own feature request from discussions in #344.

There's been some interest recently in seeing Linstor added as a remote storage driver alongside Ceph and clustered LVM.

The initial things to look at are:

• [ ] Simplest way to deploy a minimal Linstor setup over 3 machines
• [ ] CLI & API way to create or delete what we call a storage pool
• [ ] CLI & API way to create or delete a basic block volume of a defined size
• [ ] CLI & API way to create or delete a snapshot on top of a volume
• [ ] CLI & API way to create or delete a new volume from a snapshot of another volume
• [ ] CLI & API way to handle moving a volume between systems (if any operation is needed for that, usually things like locking, primary host affinity, that kind of stuff)

Go client for Linstor: https://github.com/LINBIT/golinstor

[sona78]

Hi I'm interested in working on this issue. May I be assigned to this?

[stgraber]

Hey there,

I wouldn't recommend taking on this issue as this is the kind of work that I'm currently estimating at more than a month of full time dedicated work to get this done right

[sona78]

That makes sense, thank you for letting me know

[sharathsivakumar]

@stgraber Can I take a stab at this? I would not be able to work full time on this. If there is no urgent deadline for the delivery, I can commit to working on this for the next 2~3 months and getting it done.

[stgraber]

Sure, you can start looking into this one.

The first stage doesn't actually involve Incus too much. You should basically get a few systems (I'd do 3), give them some extra disks for use with Linstor and then deploy both an Incus cluster across those systems but with no storage configured at this stage.

Then deploy Linstor on the same machines and after that, start figuring out what needs to be done through the Linstor Go client to create a pool, create volumes within that pool, create snapshots on those volumes, what are the main configuration options we'll want to expose on both pools and volumes and what needs to be done when an instance is moved from one system to another.

That all should happen outside of Incus. Once you have some example Go code using Linstor's Go client which can handle those basic cases, then we can start putting all that into a new Incus storage driver, figure out what needs to be done to be able to do basic tests of Linstor in the Github Actions environment and then get it reviewed and merged.

[stgraber]

Frequent updates within this issue as you make progress through that will be key so anyone else who knows about Linstor can assist with the best ways to set things up and to run it.

[sharathsivakumar]

@stgraber Sounds good. Thanks for the detailed explanation. I will start working on setting up the required instances and post updates here based on it. For the incus and linstor instances, VMs will be sufficient right?

[sharathsivakumar]

@stgraber Could you please assign this to me? I will start work on this from this week.

[stgraber]

Done

[thomasdba]

any updates? thanks

[stgraber]

@sharathsivakumar