Category Archives: Ceph

Ceph in an hour? Boring! How about Ceph hardware optimized with advanced topology networking & IPv6?

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This is the most remarkable deployment that I’ve had the pleasure to post about.

The RackN team has refreshed the original OpenCrowbar Ceph deployment to take advantage of the latest capabilities of the platform.  The updated workload (APL2) requires first installing RackN Enterprise or OpenCrowbar.

The update provides five distinct capabilities:

1. Fast and Repeatable

You can go from nothing to a distributed Ceph cluster in an hour.  Need to rehearse on VMs?  That’s even faster.  Want to test and retune your configuration?  Make some changes, take a coffee break and retest.  Of course, with redeploy that fast, you can iterate until you’ve got it exactly right.

2. Automatically Optimized Disc Configuration

The RackN update optimizes the Ceph installation for disk performance by finding and flagging SSDs.  That means that our deploy just works(tm) without you having to reconfigure your OS provisioning scripts or vendor disk layout.

3. Cluster Building and Balancing

This update allows you to place which roles you want on which nodes before you commit to the deployment.  You can decide the right monitor to OSD/MON ratio for your needs.  If you expand your cluster, the system will automatically rebalance the cluster.

4. Advanced Networking Topology & IPv6

Using the network conduit abstraction, you can separate front and back end networks for the cluster.  We also take advantage of native IPv6 support and even use that as the preferred addressing.

5. Both Block and Object Services

Building up from Ready State Core, you can add the Ceph workload and be quickly installing Ceph for block and object storage.
That’s a lot of advanced capabilities included out-of-the-box made possible by having a ops orchestration platform that actually understands metal.
Of course, there’s always more to improve.  Before we take on further automated tuning, we want to hear from you and learn what use-cases are most important.

Ready State Foundation for OpenStack now includes Ceph Storage

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For the Paris summit, the OpenCrowbar team delivered a PackStack demo that leveraged Crowbar’s ability to create a OpenStack ready state environment.  For the Vancouver summit, we did something even bigger: we updated the OpenCrowbar Ceph workload.

Cp_1600_1200_DB2A1582-873B-413B-8F3C-103377203FDC.jpegeph is the leading open source block storage back-end for OpenStack; however, it’s tricky to install and few vendors invest the effort to hardware optimize their configuration.  Like any foundation layer, configuration or performance errors in the storage layer will impact the entire system.  Further, the Ceph infrastructure needs to be built before OpenStack is installed.

OpenCrowbar was designed to deploy platforms like Ceph.  It has detailed knowledge of the physical infrastructure and sufficient orchestration to synchronize Ceph Mon cluster bring-up.

We are only at the start of the Ceph install journey.  Today, you can use the open source components to bring up a Ceph cluster in a reliable way that works across hardware vendors.  Much remains to optimize and tune this configuration to take advantage of SSDs, non-Centos environments and more.

We’d love to work with you to tune and extend this workload!  Please join us in the OpenCrowbar community.

You need a Squid Proxy fabric! Getting Ready State Best Practices

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Sometimes a solving a small problem well makes a huge impact for operators.  Talking to operators, it appears that automated configuration of Squid does exactly that.

Not a SQUID but...

If you were installing OpenStack or Hadoop, you would not find “setup a squid proxy fabric to optimize your package downloads” in the install guide.   That’s simply out of scope for those guides; however, it’s essential operational guidance.  That’s what I mean by open operations and creating a platform for sharing best practice.

Deploying a base operating system (e.g.: Centos) on a lot of nodes creates bit-tons of identical internet traffic.  By default, each node will attempt to reach internet mirrors for packages.  If you multiply that by even 10 nodes, that’s a lot of traffic and a significant performance impact if you’re connection is limited.

For OpenCrowbar developers, the external package resolution means that each dev/test cycle with a node boot (which is up to 10+ times a day) is bottle necked.  For qa and install, the problem is even worse!

Our solution was 1) to embed Squid proxies into the configured environments and the 2) automatically configure nodes to use the proxies.   By making this behavior default, we improve the overall performance of a deployment.   This further improves the overall network topology of the operating environment while adding improved control of traffic.

This is a great example of how Crowbar uses existing operational tool chains (Chef configures Squid) in best practice ways to solve operations problems.  The magic is not in the tool or the configuration, it’s that we’ve included it in our out-of-the-box default orchestrations.

It’s time to stop fumbling around in the operational dark.  We need to compose our tool chains in an automated way!  This is how we advance operational best practice for ready state infrastructure.

OpenCrowbar.Anvil released – hammering out a gold standard in open bare metal provisioning

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OpenCrowbarI’m excited to be announcing OpenCrowbar’s first release, Anvil, for the community.  Looking back on our original design from June 2012, we’ve accomplished all of our original objectives and more.
Now that we’ve got the foundation ready, our next release (OpenCrowbar Broom) focuses on workload development on top of the stable Anvil base.  This means that we’re ready to start working on OpenStack, Ceph and Hadoop.  So far, we’ve limited engagement on workloads to ensure that those developers would not also be trying to keep up with core changes.  We follow emergent design so I’m certain we’ll continue to evolve the core; however, we believe the Anvil release represents a solid foundation for workload development.
There is no more comprehensive open bare metal provisioning framework than OpenCrowbar.  The project’s focus on a complete operations model that comprehends hardware and network configuration with just enough orchestration delivers on a system vision that sets it apart from any other tool.  Yet, Crowbar also plays nicely with others by embracing, not replacing, DevOps tools like Chef and Puppet.
Now that the core is proven, we’re porting the Crowbar v1 RAID and BIOS configuration into OpenCrowbar.  By design, we’ve kept hardware support separate from the core because we’ve learned that hardware generation cycles need to be independent from the operations control infrastructure.  Decoupling them eliminates release disruptions that we experienced in Crowbar v1 and­ makes it much easier to use to incorporate hardware from a broad range of vendors.
Here are some key components of Anvil
  • UI, CLI and API stable and functional
  • Boot and discovery process working PLUS ability to handle pre-populating and configuration
  • Chef and Puppet capabilities including Birk Shelf v3 support to pull in community upstream DevOps scripts
  • Docker, VMs and Physical Servers
  • Crowbar’s famous “late-bound” approach to configuration and, critically, networking setup
  • IPv6 native, Ruby 2, Rails 4, preliminary scale tuning
  • Remarkably flexible and transparent orchestration (the Annealer)
  • Multi-OS Deployment capability, Ubuntu, CentOS, or Different versions of the same OS
Getting the workloads ported is still a tremendous amount of work but the rewards are tremendous.  With OpenCrowbar, the community has a new way to collaborate and integration this work.  It’s important to understand that while our goal is to start a quarterly release cycle for OpenCrowbar, the workload release cycles (including hardware) are NOT tied to OpenCrowbar.  The workloads choose which OpenCrowbar release they target.  From Crowbar v1, we’ve learned that Crowbar needed to be independent of the workload releases and so we want OpenCrowbar to focus on maintaining a strong ops platform.
This release marks four years of hard-earned Crowbar v1 deployment experience and two years of v2 design, redesign and implementation.  I’ve talked with DevOps teams from all over the world and listened to their pains and needs.  We have a long way to go before we’re deploying 1000 node OpenStack and Hadoop clusters, OpenCrowbar Anvil significantly moves the needle in that direction.
Thanks to the Crowbar community (Dell and SUSE especially) for nurturing the project, and congratulations to the OpenCrowbar team getting us this to this amazing place.

 

double Block Head with OpenStack+Equallogic & Crowbar+Ceph

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Block Head

Whew….Yesterday, Dell announced TWO OpenStack block storage capabilities (Equallogic & Ceph) for our OpenStack Essex Solution (I’m on the Dell OpenStack/Crowbar team) and community edition.  The addition of block storage effectively fills the “persistent storage” gap in the solution.  I’m quadrupally excited because we now have:

  1. both open source (Ceph) and enterprise (Equallogic) choices
  2. both Nova drivers’ code is in the open at part of our open source Crowbar work

Frankly, I’ve been having trouble sitting on the news until Dell World because both features have been available in Github before the announcement (EQLX and Ceph-Barclamp).  Such is the emerging intersection of corporate marketing and open source.

As you may expect, we are delivering them through Crowbar; however, we’ve already had customers pickup the EQLX code and apply it without Crowbar.

The Equallogic+Nova Connector

block-eqlx

If you are using Crowbar 1.5 (Essex 2) then you already have the code!  Of course, you still need to have the admin information for your SAN – we did not automate the configuration of the storage system, but the Nova Volume integration.

We have it under a split test so you need to do the following to enable the configuration options:

  1. Install OpenStack as normal
  2. Create the Nova proposal
  3. Enter “Raw” Attribute Mode
  4. Change the “volume_type” to “eqlx”
  5. Save
  6. The Equallogic options should be available in the custom attribute editor!  (of course, you can edit in raw mode too)

Want Docs?  Got them!  Check out these > EQLX Driver Install Addendum

Usage note: the integration uses SSH sessions.  It has been performance tested but not been tested at scale.

The Ceph+Nova Connector

block-ceph

The Ceph capability includes a Ceph barclamp!  That means that all the work to setup and configure Ceph is done automatically done by Crowbar.  Even better, their Nova barclamp (Ceph provides it from their site) will automatically find the Ceph proposal and link the components together!

Ceph has provided excellent directions and videos to support this install.