README for dataplane-standalone-poc

Machine setup

This is tested on Fedora 37. It's containerised and any Red Hat-like system with a fully-working Podman installation should work equally well.

We recommend SELinux not be in Enforcing mode. This is a limitation of the container used here and not Ondat's data plane which works well in production SELinux-enforcing environments.

The target_core_user kernel module must be loaded into the running kernel with modprobe target_core_user. In standard Fedora 37 this is in found in package kernel-modules.

Install podman, if not already present:

$ sudo dnf -y install podman-*
$ mkdir -p ~/git

Get prerequisite files from Ondat

Ondat needs to provide:

File(s)	Purpose
ca.crt, ca.pem	CA certificate and key for the remote Ondat cluster.
staging.tgz	Data plane build artifacts, will be copied into the container.

Grab the PoC runner

$ cd ~/git
$ git clone https://github.com/andrelucas/dataplane-standalone-poc.git dps
$ cd dps

Copy necessary files

# Matching CA certificate and key.
$ cp PATH/TO/ca.{crt,key} ca/
# Dataplane artifact binaries.
$ cp PATH/TO/staging.tgz .
$ make stage-from-tarball

Build and run

This will take a while the first time, as it will download a fairly big Docker image, and then build the test environment.

# Kill any existing environment, create a new one, and log into the client
# container.
$ make up shell

If (and only if) you're not running SELinux in enforcing mode: To reassure yourself this is running correctly, you can do a brief environment check. This will stop and start some services (references to the 'remote' here aren't relevant to this PoC).

## Inside the client container. This won't work in SELinux in Enforcing mode.
# cd /test
# ./test_init

## Back to the original directory.
# cd /tools

Connect to the remote drive

You need to know a few things about the remote volume:

Variable	Description
DEPLOYMENT_UUID	The Ondat volume's current master deployment.
REMOTE_NODE_IP	The IP address on which we can connect to the master deployment's node container.
REMOTE_NODE_UUID	The Ondat node UUID.
SIZE_BYTES	The Ondat volume's size in bytes.

## Logged in to the container via `make shell`, above.

## Start the data plane. DO NOT FORGET TO DO THIS :-)
root% systemctl start s-dataplane

## All these variables need to be filled in with appropriate values,
## none are optional.
root% export \
    DEPLOYMENT_UUID=... \
    REMOTE_NODE_IP=... \
    REMOTE_NODE_UUID=... \
    SIZE_BYTES=...

root% make poc-connect

Use the volume

# Back on the host.
$ sudo mount /var/lib/storageos/volumes/my_volume /mnt
$ ls -al /mnt
...

Ondat internal steps

Generate the staging tarball

We need to generate a tarball to give to the client. This takes a long time, C++ compilation is slow. Normally we'd just give them a tarball.

$ cd git/data
$ make rshell
...
# scripts/build.sh --release --test --inttest --install
... time passes ...
# CTRL-D

$ cd test
$ make stage-to-tarball
# This leaves staging.tgz in test/.

CA cert and key

The extraction procedure is internal-use only. We need ca.crt and ca.key from the target cluster to operate correctly.