Chapter 3. New features

OS tuning profiles added to manage kernel parameters using cephadm

With this release, to achieve feature parity with ceph-ansible, users can apply tuned profile specifications that cause cephadm to set OS tuning parameters on the hosts matching the specifications

Users can now easily set the Prometheus TSDB retention size and time in the Prometheus specification

Previously, users could not modify the default 15d retention period and disk consumption from Prometheus.

Example

service_type: prometheus
placement:
  count: 1
spec:
  retention_time: "1y"
  retention_size: "1GB"

New Ansible playbook is added to define an insecure registry

Previously, when deploying a Red Hat Ceph Storage cluster with a large number of hosts in a disconnected installation environment, it was tedious to populate the /etc/containers/registries.conf file on each host.

Improved Ceph Dashboard features for rbd-mirroring is now available

Previously, there was no Ceph Block Device Snapshot mirroring support from the user interface.

A new logging functionality is added to the Ceph dashboard

With this release, a centralized logging functionality for a single cluster, named Daemon Logs, is implemented on the dashboard under the Cluster Logs section. This makes it easier for users to monitor logs in an efficient manner.

A new TTL cache is added between the Ceph Manager and its modules

Big Ceph clusters generate a lot of data, which might overload the cluster and render modules unsuitable.

A new information message is provided on Ceph Dashboard to troubleshoot issues with Grafana

When Grafana is deployed with self-signed TLS certificates instead of certificates signed by a Certificate Authority, most browsers, such as Chrome or Firefox, do not allow the embedded Grafana iframe to be displayed within the Ceph Dashboard.

The number of repaired objects in pools is exposed under Prometheus metrics

Previously, data regarding auto-repaired objects was gathered through log parsing which was inefficient.

Ceph Dashboard now clearly indicates errors on certain CephFS operations

Previously, when a user tried to perform an operation on a filesystem directory, but did not have permission, the Ceph Dashboard reported a generic 500 internal server-side error. However, these errors are actually imputable to users, since permissions are the same for preventing certain actions for given users.

Users can now see new metrics for different storage class in Prometheus

With this release three new metrics, ceph_cluster_by_class_total_bytes, ceph_cluster_by_class_total_used_bytes, and ceph_cluster_by_class_total_used_raw_bytes, are added for different storage class in Prometheus filtered by device class which would help to follow up the performances and the capacity of the infrastructure.

The WAL and DB devices now get filters pre selected automatically

Previously, the user had to manually apply filters to the selected WAL or DB devices, which was a repetitive task.

A new shortcut button for silencing alerts is added

With this release, users can create a silence for every alert in the notification bar on the Ceph Dashboard using the newly created silent shortcut.

Users can now add server side encryption to the Ceph Object Gateway bucket from the Dashboard

Previously, there was no option on the Ceph Dashboard to add server side encryption (SSE) to the Ceph Object Gateway buckets.

Cross origin resource sharing is now allowed

Previously, IBM developers were facing issues with their storage insights product when they tried to ping the REST API using their front-end because of the tight cross origin resource sharing (CORS) policies setup in the REST API.

Example

[ceph: root@host01 /]# ceph config set mgr mgr/dashboard/cross_origin_url http://localhost:4200

Users can now set and manage quotas on subvolume group

Previously, the user could only apply quotas to individual subvolumes.

The Ceph File System client can now track average read, write, and metadata latencies

Previously, the Ceph File System client would track only the cumulative read, write, and metadata latencies. However, average read, write, and metadata latencies are more useful to the user.

The cephfs-top utility is improved with the support of multiple file systems

Previously, the cephfs-top utility with multiple file systems was not reliable. Moreover, there was no option to display the metrics for only the selected file system.

Users can now use the fs volume info command to display basic details about a volume

Previously, there was no command in Ceph File System to list only the basic details about a volume.

Users can list the in-progress or pending clones for a subvolume snapshot

Previously, there was no way of knowing the set of clone operations in-progress or pending for a subvolume snapshot, unless the user knew the clone subvolume’s name and used clone status command to infer the details.

Users can now use the --human-readable flag with the fs volume info command

Previously, all the sizes were displayed only in bytes on running the fs volume info command.

New S3 bucket lifecycle notifications are now generated

With this release, S3 bucket notifications are generated for current and non-current versions, delete-marker expiration generated by lifecycle processing. This capability is potentially useful for application workflow, among other potential uses.

The objects are transitioned to the S3 cloud endpoint as per the set lifecycle rules

In Red Hat Ceph Storage, we use a special storage class of tier type cloud-s3 to configure the remote cloud S3 object store service to which the data needs to be transitioned. These are defined in terms of zonegroup placement targets and unlike regular storage classes, do not need a data pool.

The Ceph Object Gateway S3 policy errors are now more useful

Previously, Ceph Object Gateway S3 policy error messages were opaque and not very useful. The initial issue with not being able to access data in the buckets after upgrading versions seemed to be the result of an accepted but invalid principal being ignored silently on ingest but rejected on use later due to a code change.

Level 20 Ceph Object Gateway log messages are reduced when updating bucket indices

With this release the Ceph Object Gateway level 20 log messages are reduced when updating bucket indices to remove messages that do not add value and to reduce size of logs.

Lifecycle policy now runs on all zones in multi-site configurations

With this release, lifecycle policy runs on all zones in multi-site Red Hat Ceph Storage configurations, which makes lifecycle processing more resilient in these configurations. The changes are made to also permit new features, such as conditional processing in archive zones.

Multi-site configuration supports dynamic bucket index resharding

Previously, only manual resharding of the buckets for multi-site configurations was supported.

Sites can now customize STS max-session-duration parameter with the role interface

Previously, the max-session-duration parameter controlling duration of STS sessions could not be configured because it was not exposed on the interface.

Kafka SASL/SCRAM security mechanism is added to bucket notifications

With this release, Kafka SASL/SCRAM security mechanism is added to bucket notifications.

Low-level log messages are introduced to warn user about hitting throttle limits

Previously, there was a lack of low-level logging indication that throttle limits were hit, causing these occurrences to incorrectly have the appearance of a networking issue.

The user is warned on Filestore deprecation through ceph status and ceph health detail commands

BlueStore is the default and widely used objectstore.

User can now take advantage of a tunable KernelDevice buffer in BlueStore

With this release, users can now configure custom alignment for read buffers using bdev_read_buffer_alignment command in BlueStore. This removes the limitations imposed by the default 4 KiB alignment space, when buffers are intended to be backed up by huge pages.

OSDs report the slow operation details in an aggregated format to the Ceph cluster log

Previously, slow requests would overwhelm a cluster log with too many details, filling up the monitor database.

Users can now blocklist a CIDR range

With this release, you can blocklist a CIDR range, in addition to individual client instances and IPs. In certain circumstances, you would want to blocklist all clients in an entire data center or rack instead of specifying individual clients to blocklist.

librbd SSD-based persistent write-back cache to reduce latency now fully supported.

With this release, the pwl_cache librbd plugin provides a log-structured write-back cache targeted at SSD devices. Just as with the already provided log-structured write-back cache targeted at PMEM devices, the updates to the image are batched and flushed in-order, retaining the actual image in a crash-consistent state. The benefits and use cases remain the same, but users no longer need to procure more expensive PMEM devices to take advantage of them.

Layered client-side encryption is now supported

With this release, cloned images can be encrypted, each with its own encryption format and passphrase, potentially different from that of the parent image. The efficient copy-on-write semantics used for unformatted regular cloned images are retained.