# Capabilities and Extra-Specs

Cloud Administrators create Share types with extra-specs to:

- influence the scheduler’s decision to place new shares, and

- instruct the Shared File System service or its storage driver/s to perform certain special actions with respect to the users’ shares.

As an administrator, you can choose a descriptive name or provide good descriptions for your share types to convey the share type capabilities to end users. End users can view standard `tenant-visible` extra-specs that can let them seek required behavior and automate their applications accordingly. By design, however, all other extra-specs of a share type are not exposed to non-privileged users.

## Types of Extra-Specs

The Shared File Systems service back-end storage drivers offer a wide range of capabilities. The variation in these capabilities allows cloud administrators to provide a storage service catalog to their end users. Share type extra-specs tie-in with these capabilities.

Some back-end capabilities are very specific to a storage system, and are opaque to the Shared File System service or the end users. These capabilities are invoked with the help of “scoped” extra-specs. Using scoped extra-specs is a way to provide programmatic directives to the concerned storage driver to do something during share creation or share manipulation. You can learn about the opaque capabilities through driver documentation and configure these capabilities within share types as scoped extra-specs (e.g.: hpe3par:nfs_options). The Shared File System service scheduler ignores scoped extra-specs during its quest to find the right back end to provision shares.

There are some back-end capabilities in manila that do matter to the scheduler. For our understanding, lets call these non-scoped or non-opaque capabilities. All non-scoped capabilities can be directly used as share types extra-specs. They are considered by the scheduler’s capabilities filter (and any custom filter defined by deployers).

You can get a list of non-scoped capabilities from the scheduler by using:

    $ manila pool-list --detail

The non-scoped capabilities can be of three types:

- Capabilities pertaining to a specific back end storage system driver: For example, huawei_smartcache. No Shared File System service API relies on non-opaque back end specific capabilities.

- Common capabilities that are not visible to end users: The manila community has standardized some cross-platform capabilities like thin_provisioning, dedupe, compression, qos, ipv6_support and ipv4_support. Values of these options do not matter to any Shared File System service APIs; however, they can signify something to the manila services themselves. For example when a back end supports thin_provisioning, the scheduler service performs over-provisioning, and if a back end does not report ipv6_support as True, the share-manager service drops IPv6 access rules before invoking the storage driver to update access rules.

- Common capabilities that are visible to end users: Some capabilities affect functionality exposed via the Shared File System service API. For example, not all back ends support snapshots, and even if they do, they may not support all of the snapshot operations. For example, cloning snapshots into new shares, reverting shares in-place to snapshots, etc.

  The support for these capabilities determines whether users would be able to perform certain control-plane operations with manila. For example, a back end driver may report snapshot_support=True allowing end users to create share snapshots, however, the driver can report create_share_from_snapshot_support=False. This reporting allows cloud administrators to create share types that support snapshots but not creating shares from snapshots. When a user uses such a share type, they will not be able to clone snapshots into new shares. Tenant-visible capabilities aid manila in validating requests and failing fast on requests it cannot accommodate. They also help level set the user expectations on some failures. For example, if snapshot_support is set to False on the share type, since users can see this, they will not invoke the create snapshot API, and even if they do, they will understand the HTTP 400 (and error message) in better context.

Important

All extra-specs are optional, except one: driver_handles_share_servers.

## Scheduler’s treatment of non-scoped extra specs

The CapabilitiesFilter in the Shared File System scheduler uses the following for matching operators:

- No operator This defaults to doing a python ==. Additionally it will match boolean values.

- <=, >=, ==, !=

  This does a float conversion and then uses the python operators as expected.

- <in>

  This either chooses a host that has partially matching string in the capability or chooses a host if it matches any value in a list. For example, if “<in> sse4” is used, it will match a host that reports capability of “sse4_1” or “sse4_2”.

- <or>

  This chooses a host that has one of the items specified. If the first word in the string is <or>, another <or> and value pair can be concatenated. Examples are “<or> 3”, “<or> 3 <or> 5”, and “<or> 1 <or> 3 <or> 7”. This is for string values only.

- <is>

  This chooses a host that matches a boolean capability. An example extra-spec value would be “<is> True”.

- =

  This does a float conversion and chooses a host that has equal to or greater than the resource specified. This operator behaves this way for historical reasons.

- s==, s!=, s>=, s>, s<=, s<

  The “s” indicates it is a string comparison. These choose a host that satisfies the comparison of strings in capability and specification. For example, if “capabilities:replication_type s== dr”, a host that reports replication_type of “dr” will be chosen. If “share_backend_name s!= cephfs” is used, any host not named “cephfs” can be chosen.

For vendor-specific non-scoped capabilities (which need to be visible to the scheduler), drivers are recommended to use the vendor prefix followed by an underscore. This is not a strict requirement, but can provide a consistent look along-side the scoped extra-specs and will be a clear indicator of vendor capabilities vs. common capabilities.

## Common Capabilities

Common capabilities apply to multiple backends. Like all other backend reported capabilities, these capabilities can be used verbatim as extra_specs in share types used to create shares.

## Share type common capability extra-specs that are visible to end users:

- driver_handles_share_servers is a special, required common capability. When set to True, the scheduler matches requests with back ends that can isolate user workloads with dedicated share servers exporting shares on user provided share networks.

- snapshot_support indicates whether snapshots are supported for shares created on the pool/backend. When administrators do not set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the scheduler can place new shares of that type in pools without regard for whether snapshots are supported, and those shares will not support snapshots.

- create_share_from_snapshot_support indicates whether a backend can create a new share from a snapshot. When administrators do not set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the scheduler can place new shares of that type in pools without regard for whether creating shares from snapshots is supported, and those shares will not support creating shares from snapshots.

- revert_to_snapshot_support indicates that a driver is capable of reverting a share in place to its most recent snapshot. When administrators do not set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the scheduler can place new shares of that type in pools without regard for whether reverting shares to snapshots is supported, and those shares will not support reverting shares to snapshots.

- mount_snapshot_support indicates that a driver is capable of exporting share snapshots for mounting. Users can provide and revoke access to mountable snapshots just like they can with their shares.

- replication_type indicates the style of replication supported for the backend/pool. This extra_spec will have a string value and could be one of writable, readable or dr. writable replication type involves synchronously replicated shares where all replicas are writable. Promotion is not supported and not needed. readable and dr replication types involve a single active or primary replica and one or more non-active or secondary replicas per share. In readable type of replication, non-active replicas have one or more export_locations and can thus be mounted and read while the active replica is the only one that can be written into. In dr style of replication, only the active replica can be mounted, read from and written into.

- availability_zones indicates a comma separated list of availability zones that can be used for provisioning. Users can always provide a specific availability zone during share creation, and they will receive a synchronous failure message if they attempt to create a share in an availability zone that the share type does not permit. If you do not set this extra-spec, the share type is assumed to be serviceable in all availability zones known to the Shared File Systems service.

- mount_point_name_support whether a custom export location could be specified during share creation. To enable users to specify a custom mount point for their shares, administrators must set this extra-specification in the share type to True. They must also provide an extra-spec named `provisioning:mount_point_prefix`. The service will use this prefix in conjunction with the mount point name provided by end users during share creation. When `provisioning:mount_point_prefix` is not set on a share type, but `mount_point_name_support` is enabled, the share’s export location will be prefixed with the `project_id`. However, shares created with a `project_id` prefix are not eligible for transfer. For these shares to be transferred to a different project, the admin will need to manually unmount them from the current project and mount them to the target project.

## Share type common capability extra-specs that are not visible to end users:

- dedupe indicates that a backend/pool can provide shares using some deduplication technology. The default value of the dedupe capability (if a driver doesn’t report it) is False. Drivers can support both dedupe and non-deduped shares in a single storage pool by reporting `dedupe=[True, False]`. You can make a share type use deduplication by setting this extra-spec to ‘<is> True’, or prevent it by setting this extra-spec to ‘<is> False’.

- compression indicates that a backend/pool can provide shares using some compression technology. The default value of the compression capability (if a driver doesn’t report it) is False. Drivers can support compressed and non-compressed shares in a single storage pool by reporting `compression=[True, False]`. You can make a share type use compression by setting this extra-spec to ‘<is> True’, or prevent it by setting this extra-spec to ‘<is> False’.

- thin_provisioning can be enabled where shares will not be guaranteed space allocations and overprovisioning will be enabled. This capability defaults to False. Back ends/pools that support thin provisioning report True for this capability. Administrators can make a share type use thin provisioned shares by setting this extra-spec to ‘<is> True’. If a driver reports thin_provisioning=False (the default) then it’s assumed that the driver is doing thick provisioning and overprovisioning is turned off. A driver can support thin provisioned and thick provisioned shares in the same pool by reporting `thin_provisioning=[True, False]`.

  To provision a thick share on a back end that supports both thin and thick provisioning, set one of the following in extra specs:

    {'thin_provisioning': 'False'}
    {'thin_provisioning': '<is> False'}
    {'capabilities:thin_provisioning': 'False'}
    {'capabilities:thin_provisioning': '<is> False'}

- qos indicates that a backend/pool can provide shares using some QoS (Quality of Service) specification. The default value of the qos capability (if a driver doesn’t report it) is False. You can make a share type use QoS by setting this extra-spec to ‘<is> True’ and also setting the relevant QoS-related extra specs for the drivers being used. Administrators can prevent a share type from using QoS by setting this extra-spec to ‘<is> False’. Different drivers have different ways of specifying QoS limits (or guarantees) and this extra spec merely allows the scheduler to filter by pools that either have or don’t have QoS support enabled.

- ipv4_support indicates whether a back end can create a share that can be accessed via IPv4 protocol. If administrators do not set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the scheduler can place new shares of that type in pools without regard for whether IPv4 is supported.

- ipv6_support - indicates whether a back end can create a share that can be accessed via IPv6 protocol. If administrators do not set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the scheduler can place new shares of that type in pools without regard for whether IPv6 is supported.

- provisioning:max_share_size can set the max size of share, the value must be an integer and greater than 0. If administrators set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the size of share created with the share type can not be greater than the specified value.

- provisioning:min_share_size can set the min size of share, the value must be an integer and greater than 0. If administrators set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the size of share created with the share type can not be less than the specified value.

- provisioning:max_share_extend_size can set the max size of share extend, the value must be an integer and greater than 0. If administrators set this capability as an extra-spec in a share type, the size of share extended with the share type can not be greater than the specified value. This capability is ignored for regular users and the “provisioning:max_share_size” is the only effective limit.

- provisioning:mount_point_prefix can set prefix for human readable mount_point_name, the value must be a string containing ASCII alphabets and optionally, the underscore character.

this page last updated: 2026-03-20 00:30:00

Except where otherwise noted, this document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. See all OpenStack Legal Documents.

found an error? report a bug