The Red Hat Ceph Storage life cycle: upgrade scenarios and long-lived deployments

with Sean Murphy (Red Hat)

Different industries have varying requirements for the software systems on which their respective businesses rely. Some operators choose to quickly embrace the latest and greatest release when facing change and integration updates. Others defer upgrades for as long as possible, trying to continue on a tried-and-true combination of software components until end-of-support (or security patching) forces a change.

The distinction is somewhat artificial, as most operators really adopt a combination of the two strategies for different parts of their infrastructure. The Red Hat Ceph Storage life cycle aims to address both faster and slower movers. In this post, we’ll share how we’re helping customers stay current while also providing longer life cycle options where needed.

Software

Highlights of Alpha 4 release include the new integrated installer

with Daniel Pivonka (Red Hat) and Paul Cuzner (Red Hat)

We’re delighted to announce availability of the new Alpha 4 release of Red Hat Ceph Storage 5, built on the upstream project’s Pacific release cycle. This post is the first of a series that will walk you through the enhancements coming with the next major upgrade of Ceph Storage—
well ahead of their production release—and give the details needed to facilitate testing with early-access releases.

Today’s post centers on the new Cephadm interface to the orchestration API, which is intended to become the preferred bare-metal installation and management method for Ceph across the broader vendor community. You can find download details for early access releases at the end of this blog. Now, without further ado, on to what is new.

A short history

In the recent...

Deploying a containerized Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 cluster for Red Hat Open Stack Platform 16

with John Fulton (Red Hat) and Gregory Charot (Red Hat)

Ceph is the most popular storage backend for OpenStack by a wide margin, as has been reported by the OpenStack Foundation’s survey every year since its inception. In the latest survey, conducted during the Summer of 2019, Ceph outclassed other options by an even greater margin than it did in the past, with a 75% adoption rate.

Red Hat’s default method for installing OpenStack is with a tool called director. This tool can configure OpenStack to connect with an existing Ceph cluster, or it can deploy a new Ceph cluster as part of the process to create a new OpenStack private cloud. Because director integrates ceph-ansible, the same deployment options described in our previous post dedicated to it remain available from director. This post...

Sage, Uday, and I put our best efforts into making sure that the new virtual venue for the Red Hat Summit would not diminish customer access and visibility into our future plans for Ceph. We delivered an unprecedented 18-month roadmap for the downstream, enterprise-class supported product, showcasing the “secret deck” that is usually reserved for internal planning use within our team — I usually make a roadmap statement to customers only when we have a 70%+ confidence estimate and delivery is scheduled to occur within a year, but this time I chose to relax the rules a little to give you a view stretching two major releases and 18-months into the future. We wanted to reward your virtual attention with more access by providing a little more food for thought into what is coming with Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 and 6 this Summer and the next.

Not to be outdone, Sage walked us through...

Putting noisy neighbors in their place with “RBD Top” and QoS

with Jason Dillaman (Red Hat)

Prior to Red Hat Storage 4, Ceph storage administrators have not had access to built-in RBD performance monitoring and metrics gathering tools. While a storage administrator could monitor high-level cluster or OSD I/O metrics, oftentimes this was too coarse-grained to determine the source of noisy neighbor workloads running on top of RBD images. The best available workaround, assuming the storage administrator had access to all client nodes, was to poll the metrics from the client nodes via some kind of homegrown makeshift external tooling.

Ceph Storage 4 now incorporates a generic metrics gathering framework within the OSDs and MGRs to provide built-in monitoring, and new RBD performance monitoring tools are built on top of this framework to translate individual RADOS object metrics into...

Deploying a containerized Ceph Storage 4 cluster using ceph-ansible

with Guillaume Abrioux (Red Hat) and Paul Cuzner (Red Hat)

Introduction

The landscape of modern IT infrastructure is dominated by software defined networking, public cloud, hybrid cloud and software defined storage. The shift from legacy hardware centric architectures to embrace software defined infrastructure requires a more mature orchestration “engine” to manage changes across distributed systems. For many enterprises, Ansible has fulfilled this requirement and this in turn has led to the upstream Ceph community basing their next generation management toolchain on Ansible, in the form of Sébastien Han’s ceph-ansible.

Ceph Storage was the first Red Hat product to incorporate Ansible technology after our October 2015 acquisition of Ansible’s corporate sponsor. Red hat Ceph Storage has been shipping ceph-ansible...

The Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 Dashboard changes the game

with Paul Cuzner (Red Hat)

Ease of use was a key development theme for Red Hat Ceph Storage 4. In our last post, we covered the role that the new install UI plays in enabling administrators to deploy Ceph Storage 4 in a simple and guided manner, without prior Ceph expertise.

Simplifying installation is only the first step—the second step is simplifying day-to-day management. To meet this challenge, Ceph Storage 4 introduces a new graphical user interface called the Dashboard.

Ceph Storage Dashboard architecture

Ceph Storage 4 delivers a new web based User Interface (UI) to simplify and to a certain extent, de-mystify, the day-to-day management of a Ceph cluster. The UI has been developed to exploit the pluggable architecture of Ceph, consisting of:

• A Python backend providing stable API services and Ceph cluster integration
• ...

The Nautilus technology cornerstone to a roaring 2020

Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 brings the Nautilus codebase to our portfolio of marquee-name customers, and lays the foundation for our Ceph storage product portfolio for the rest of the year. 4.0 is integrated with OpenStack Platform 16 from the start, enabling customers to roll out the latest and greatest across the Red Hat Portfolio: OpenStack Platform 16 on RHEL 8.1 with RHCS 4.0 through a single, director-driven install process, equally supporting dis-aggregated and hyperconverged configurations. The combination of Bluestore and Beast as default components literally doubles our object store performance compared to 12 months ago, and that is just the start of our Object story for what promises to be a very busy year indeed.

Today, we are releasing version 4 of Red Hat Ceph Storage, a new rendition of our infrastructure storage...

with Paul Cuzner (Red Hat)

Lowering the bar to installing Ceph

The last few years have seen Ceph continue to mature in stability, scale and performance to become the leading open source storage platform. However, getting started with Ceph has typically involved the administrator learning automation products like Ansible first. While learning Ansible brings its own rewards, wouldn’t it be great if you could simply skip this step and just get on with learning and using Ceph?

The upcoming Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 introduces a GUI installation tool built on top of the Cockpit web console. Under the covers, we still rely on the latest iteration of the same trusted ceph-ansible installation flows that have been with us since 2016. The new install UI guides users with no prior Ceph knowledge to build clusters ready for use by providing sensible defaults and making the right choices without...

After an almost seven month team effort focusing on our next-generation Rook and Ceph Nautilus-based storage products, we have taken a little bit of time to refresh the releases currently in production. We are pleased to announce the availability of Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.3, our sixteenth RHCS release.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.3 delivers the latest Luminous upstream release and a number of important bug fixes to customers. Two noteworthy new features include an Object Gateway front-end capable of serving more requests with fewer resources, and standard support for 12 TB disk drives.

Least but not last, we are introducing an extended lifecycle option, bringing Ceph support options to a full five years. Oh, one more thing: one billion objects. Read on!

Rebase

Red Hat Ceph Storage 3.3 continues our record of delivering the latest bits of Ceph technology while ensuring we maintain the...