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Chapter 1. Introduction to integrating Red Hat Ceph Storage with an overcloud

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Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) director creates a cloud environment called the overcloud. Director provides the ability to configure extra features for an overcloud. One of these extra features includes integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage. This includes both Ceph Storage clusters created with the director or existing Ceph Storage clusters.

The Red Hat Ceph cluster described in this guide features containerized Ceph Storage. For more information about containerized services in RHOSP, see Configuring a basic overcloud with the CLI tools in the Director Installation and Usage Guide.

1.1. Defining Ceph Storage

Red Hat Ceph Storage is a distributed data object store designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. Distributed object stores are the future of storage, because they accommodate unstructured data, and because clients can use modern object interfaces and legacy interfaces simultaneously. At the heart of every Ceph deployment is the Ceph Storage cluster, which consists of two types of daemons:

Ceph Object Storage Daemon
A Ceph Object Storage Daemon (OSD) stores data on behalf of Ceph clients. Additionally, Ceph OSDs utilize the CPU and memory of Ceph nodes to perform data replication, rebalancing, recovery, monitoring, and reporting functions.
Ceph Monitor
A Ceph monitor (MON) maintains a master copy of the Ceph Storage cluster map with the current state of the storage cluster.

For more information about Red Hat Ceph Storage, see the Red Hat Ceph Storage Architecture Guide.

Note

Ceph File System (CephFS) through NFS is supported. For more information, see CephFS via NFS Back End Guide for the Shared File Systems Service.

1.2. Defining the scenario

This guide provides instructions for deploying a containerized Red Hat Ceph cluster with your overcloud. To do this, the director uses Ansible playbooks provided through the ceph-ansible package. The director also manages the configuration and scaling operations of the cluster.

1.3. Setting requirements

This guide contains information supplementary to the Director Installation and Usage guide.

If you are using the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director to create Ceph Storage nodes, note the following requirements for these nodes:

Placement Groups
Ceph uses Placement Groups to facilitate dynamic and efficient object tracking at scale. In the case of OSD failure or cluster re-balancing, Ceph can move or replicate a placement group and its contents, which means a Ceph cluster can re-balance and recover efficiently. The default Placement Group count that Director creates is not always optimal so it is important to calculate the correct Placement Group count according to your requirements. You can use the Placement Group calculator to calculate the correct count: Ceph Placement Groups (PGs) per Pool Calculator
Processor
64-bit x86 processor with support for the Intel 64 or AMD64 CPU extensions.
Memory
Red Hat typically recommends a baseline of 16GB of RAM per OSD host, with an additional 2 GB of RAM per OSD daemon.
Disk Layout

Sizing is dependant on your storage need. The recommended Red Hat Ceph Storage node configuration requires at least three or more disks in a layout similar to the following:

  • /dev/sda - The root disk. The director copies the main Overcloud image to the disk. This should be at minimum 50 GB of available disk space.
  • /dev/sdb - The journal disk. This disk divides into partitions for Ceph OSD journals. For example, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2, /dev/sdb3, and onward. The journal disk is usually a solid state drive (SSD) to aid with system performance.
  • /dev/sdc and onward - The OSD disks. Use as many disks as necessary for your storage requirements.

    Note

    Red Hat OpenStack Platform director uses ceph-ansible, which does not support installing the OSD on the root disk of Ceph Storage nodes. This means you need at least two or more disks for a supported Ceph Storage node.

Network Interface Cards
A minimum of one 1 Gbps Network Interface Cards, although it is recommended to use at least two NICs in a production environment. Use additional network interface cards for bonded interfaces or to delegate tagged VLAN traffic. It is recommended to use a 10 Gbps interface for storage node, especially if creating an OpenStack Platform environment that serves a high volume of traffic.
Power Management
Each Controller node requires a supported power management interface, such as an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) functionality, on the motherboard of the server.
Image Properties
To help improve Red Hat Ceph Storage block device performance, you can configure the Glance image to use the virtio-scsi driver. For more information about recommended image properties for images, see Congfiguring Glance in the Red Hat Ceph Storage documentation.

This guide also requires the following:

Important

The Ceph Monitor service is installed on the overcloud Controller nodes. This means that you must provide adequate resources to alleviate performance issues. Ensure that the Controller nodes in your environment use at least 16 GB of RAM for memory and solid-state drive (SSD) storage for the Ceph monitor data. For a medium to large Ceph installation, provide at least 500 GB of Ceph monitor data. This space is necessary to avoid levelDB growth if the cluster becomes unstable.

1.4. Additional resources

The /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/environments/ceph-ansible/ceph-ansible.yaml environment file instructs the director to use playbooks derived from the ceph-ansible project. These playbooks are installed in /usr/share/ceph-ansible/ of the undercloud. In particular, the following file lists all the default settings applied by the playbooks:

  • /usr/share/ceph-ansible/group_vars/all.yml.sample
Warning

Although ceph-ansible uses playbooks to deploy containerized Ceph Storage, do not edit these files to customize your deployment. Instead, use heat environment files to override the defaults set by these playbooks. If you edit the ceph-ansible playbooks directly, your deployment fails.

For information about the default settings applied by director for containerized Ceph Storage, see the heat templates in /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/deployment/ceph-ansible.

Note

Reading these templates requires a deeper understanding of how environment files and Heat templates work in director. See Understanding Heat Templates and Environment Files for reference.

Lastly, for more information about containerized services in OpenStack, see Configuring a basic overcloud with the CLI tools in the Director Installation and Usage Guide.

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