Huawei Oceanstor volume driver is not up to date with official Huawei's driver

[Alejandro Garcia]

Hi all. We have been working integrating Cinder with some Huawei OceanStor storage solutions (a v3 and a v6 ones). After dealing with some performance issues, we have noticed the Huawei drivers used by Cinder are really outdated, and we would like to know if there was a reason for this or if it's something we could improve.

To add some more context, it seems the driver version present in Cinder repo (cinder/volume/drivers/huawei folder) states VERSION = "2.0.9". However, we've found an official Huawei repo with the driver at https://github.com/Huawei/OpenStack_Driver whose latest version is 2.5.4.

For some reason, it appears that the driver's code is getting updated in that repo and not in Cinder's one. In fact, there's a guide to fetch the source code of the driver from Huawei's repo and apply it into a running OpenStack Cinder instance (section 4 at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Huawei/OpenStack_Driver/master/ConfigDoc/en/OpenStack%20Cinder%20Driver%20Configuration%20Guide.pdf). We've tried these steps in a Victoria Kolla-based environment and were able to successfully use the 2.5.4 driver against a Huawei Dorado v3 and v6.

Knowing there's another repository with an improved version of the driver, and that its compatibility matrix states full support of the several Huawei storages, could we consider importing its code into Cinder? We've already checked and the code has an Apache 2 license, so there should be no problem with that.

[Sofia Enriquez (lsofia-enriquez)]

Absolutely, this seems like a relevant topic for discussion. However, given that next week is the Infra Summit, we might not get the chance to delve into it immediately. Therefore, I kindly ask you to add this as an item for discussion to our next Cinder meeting at https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/cinder-bobcat-meetings. We can then discuss it in more detail when we are all available.

Thanks

[Alejandro Garcia (agarciaws)]

Hi Sofia, thank you for your response! Understood. Since we will be on public holidays here in Chile the 21st, we would be available to discuss this on the 28th. Is that OK for you?