Migrate from cinder loopback device to physical block device on RDO Mitaka

In PoC or test installations of RDO Mitaka via Packstack, by default the cinder-volumes LVM volume group is created in the form of a loopback file/device under /var/lib/cinder/

This might be OK for light testing, but if you plan to use cinder volumes in production you need to create the cinder-volumes VG on a real physical device.

After stopping all openstack services with openstack-service stop I used vgs and lvs to take a look at the LVM volume groups and logical volumes on my Openstack storage node (which I separated from the control node using unsupported config options in my Packstack answer file).

Despite stopping Openstack services, when I tried to use lvchange -ay and vgchange -ay to deactivate LV's in the cinder-volumes VG I kept getting error messages that some logical volumes in the VG were still active.

I finally just used gdisk to delete the problematic LVM partition housing cinder-volumes, rebooted and then created a new cinder-volumes VG as detailed in my previous post about setting up Cinder to use a physical block device.

However, after restarting Openstack services, openstack-cinder-volume.service failed to start. I examined the systemd service file for cinder-volume.service in /usr/lib/systemd/system/ and noticed that it contained the line

After = openstack-losetup.service

It turns out that /usr/lib/systemd/system/openstack-losetup.service sets up a loop device to act as a "disk" for storing the cinder-volumes Volume Group. Of course the loop device is just a file and has really bad I/O, so it should only be used for test setups.

I therefore deleted openstack-losetup.service, removed the ...losetup line from the systemd config for cinder-volume.service, and then executed systemctl daemon-reload to reload all systemd service files.

Now openstack-cinder-volume.service starts without any errors and doesn't require a loopback device.