Welcome to ECS Community Edition’s documentation!

Documentation Status

ECS Community Edition

See changelog.md file for release notes.

Description

EMC ECS is a stateful containerized cloud storage. It provides persistence for your applications that can access data through standardized Object protocols like AWS S3 or OpenStack Swift. ECS can be set up on one or more hosts / VMs in a single-site or a multi-site geo replicated configuration. We want the wider community to use ECS and provide feedback. Usage of this software is under the following End User License Agreement.

ECS Community Edition is a free, reduced footprint, version of Dell EMC’s ECS software. Of course, this means there are some limitations to the use of the software, so the question arises; how is the Community Edition of ECS different from the production version?

License difference

As noted with the included license, ECS Community cannot be used in production environments and is intended to be used for trial and proof of concept purposes only. This software is still owned and protected by Dell EMC.

Feature differences

It it important to note that ECS-Community Edition is not the same as ECS software and as such lacks some features that are integral to the actual ECS software.

  • ECS Community Edition does NOT support encryption.
  • ECS Community Edition does NOT include ECS’ system management, or “fabric”, layer.

Notice

Because of these differences, ECS Community Edition is absolutely not qualified for testing failure scenarios. Failure scenarios can only be adequately mimicked on the full version of ECS Software.

Quick Start Guide

If you have the following:

  1. A CentOS 7.4 Minimal instance with:
    1. 16GB RAM
    2. 16GB block device for system
    3. 104GB block device for ECS
  2. Internet access
  3. No proxies, local mirrors, or special Docker registries

Then you should be able to get up and going with a Single-Node All-in-One install using these commands on your VM:

# git clone https://github.com/EMCECS/ECS-CommunityEdition
# cd ECS-CommunityEdition
# cp docs/design/reference.deploy.yml deploy.yml
# echo "Edit this deploy.yml to match your VM's environment"
# vi deploy.yml
# ./bootstrap.sh -y -c deploy.yml

And then after the node reboots (you did use a clean minimal install from ISO or netinstall right?):

# step1
# step2

And if all went well, you now have a working stand-alone ECS, mostly configured, and ready for use.

Hardware Requirements

Hardware or virtual machine with:

  • 4 CPU Cores
  • 16GB RAM
  • 16GB root block storage
  • 104GB additional block storage
  • CentOS 7.4 Minimal installation

Hardware or virtual machine with:

  • 8 CPU Cores
  • 64GB RAM
  • 16GB root block storage
  • 1TB additional block storage
  • CentOS 7.4 Minimal installation

Deployment Scenarios

ECS Single-Node All-in-One Deployment (smallest footprint)

Deploy a stand-alone instance of a limited set of ECS kit to a single hardware or virtual machine.

Deployments into Soft-Isolated and Air-Gapped Island Environments

Important information regarding Island deployments

Please be aware that install node bootstrapping requires Internet access to the hardware or virtual machine that will become the install node, but once this step is complete, the machine can be removed from the Internet and migrated into the Island environment.

If you prefer to download a prefab install node as an OVF/OVA, follow one of the links below. Please note that OVAs are produced upon each release and do not necessarily have the most current software.

Please see the release page for OVA download links.

ECS Single-Node Deployment with Install Node

Using an install node for isolated environments, deploy a stand-alone instance of a limited set of ECS kit to a single hardware or virtual machine.