Chapter 1. Introduction

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 core of every Ceph deployment is the Ceph Storage cluster, which consists of several types of daemons, but primarily, these two:

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

This guide provides instructions on integrating an existing Ceph Storage cluster with an overcloud. This means the director configures the overcloud to use the Ceph Storage cluster for storage needs. You manage and scale the cluster itself outside of the Overcloud configuration.

When Red Hat OpenStack Platform director deploys the Shared File Systems service with CephFS through NFS, it deploys the NFS-Ganesha gateway on Controller nodes managed by Pacemaker (PCS). PCS manages cluster availability using an active-passive configuration.

This feature enables director to deploy the Shared File System with an external Ceph Storage cluster. In this type of deployment, Ganesha still runs on the Controller nodes managed by PCS.

You must edit the parameters in ceph-ansible-external.yaml to integrate the Shared File System with an external Ceph Storage cluster.

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

For more information about CephFS through NFS, see Deploying the Shared File Systems service with CephFS through NFS.