Protecting your Ceph pools against removal or property changes

One of the dangers of Ceph was that by accident you could remove a multi TerraByte pool and loose all the data. Although the CLI tools asked you for conformation, librados and all it’s bindings did not. Imagine explaining that you just removed a 200TB pool from your storage system due to a typo in […]

Rebuilding libvirt under CentOS 7.1 with RBD storage pool support

If you want to use CentOS 7.1 for your hypervisors with Apache CloudStack and Ceph’s RBD as Primary Storage you need to rebuild libvirt. CloudStack requires libvirt to be built with RBD storage pool support. It uses libvirt to manage RBD volumes. By default libvirt under CentOS is not built with this support. (On Ubuntu […]

A quick note on running CloudStack with RBD on Ubuntu 12.04

When you want to use Ceph as Primary Storage in Apache CloudStack you need a recent version of libvirt with RBD storage pool support enabled. If you want to use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise) you would need to manually compile libvirt since the default libvirt version doesn’t include RBD storage pool support. But not any […]

Redundant Ceph monitors with Round Robin DNS

One of the unique features of Ceph is that it can be build without any Single Point of Failure. No single machine will take your cluster down when designed properly. Ceph’s monitors play a crucial part in this. To make them redundant you want a odd number of monitors, where 3 is more then sufficient […]

Enhanced RBD support for CloudStack 4.2

About 1 hour ago the new storage subsystem got merged into the master branch of CloudStack. That is wonderful news for all you out there who want to use features like snapshotting with RBD in CloudStack. In pre-4.2 CloudStack a snapshot was the same as a backup. As soon as you created a snapshot it […]

Ceph distributed storage with CloudStack

As we are nearing the CloudStack 4.0 release I figured it was time I’d write something about the Ceph integration in CloudStack 4.0 In the beginning of this year we (my company) decided we wanted to use CloudStack for our cloud product, but we also wanted to use Ceph for the storage. CloudStack lacked the […]