SUSE pulls the plug on SES. What are your options now?
A few months back the news came that SUSE stops supporting its Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) product to their customers. And, with one eye on Rancher, will promote Longhorn instead. As we support mostly very avid Ceph storage teams we dove into the options you have if you are now a SUSE Enterprise Storage […]
Cephalocon 2021, Let’s talk Ceph!
At this moment we are busy with the organization of another Cephalocon. Cephalocon is an annual event organized by the Ceph Foundation. By organizing Cephalocon, Ceph aims to bring together technologists and adopters from across the globe to showcase Ceph’s history and its future, demonstrate real-world applications, and highlight vendor solutions. By doing this, Ceph […]
ZFS and Ceph, what a lovely couple they make!
Stable, secure data storage is probably one of the most important things in today’s data-driven world. With the ability to scale fast. Combining two great storage solutions provides you with all those in one. ZFS and Ceph are a couple that cannot easily be beaten! Why is that? The short explanation is scalability. ZFS is […]
Press release
Fairbanks, leading provider in open source cloud solutions, announces the acquisition of 42on, leading provider of services for the scalable, open source Ceph storage platform. With this acquisition, Fairbanks expands its service portfolio in the open infrastructure realm. Ruud Harmsen, founder and CEO of Fairbanks: “We have been managing and supporting highly available private OpenStack […]
HAProxy in front of Ceph Manager dashboard
The Ceph Mgr dashboard plugin allows for an easy dashboard which can show you how your Ceph cluster is performing. In certain situations you can’t contact the Mgr daemons directly and you have to place a Proxy server between your computer and the Mgr daemons. This can be done easily with HAProxy and the following […]
VXLAN with VyOS and Ubuntu 18.04
VXLAN Virtual Extensible LAN uses encapsulation technique to encapsulate OSI layer 2 Ethernet frames within layer 4 UDP datagrams. More on this can be found on the link provided. For a Ceph and CloudStack environment I needed to set up a Proof-of-Concept using VXLAN and some refurbished hardware. The main purpose of this PoC is […]
Placement Groups with Ceph Luminous stay in activating state
Placement Groups stuck in activating When migrating from FileStore with BlueStore with Ceph Luminuous you might run into the problem that certain Placement Groups stay stuck in the activating state. 44 activating+undersized+degraded+remapped PG Overdose This is a side-effect of the new PG overdose protection in Ceph Luminous. Too many PGs on your OSDs can cause […]
Quick overview of Ceph version running on OSDs
When checking a Ceph cluster it’s useful to know which versions you OSDs in the cluster are running. There is a very simple on-line command to do this: ceph osd metadata|jq ‘.[].ceph_version’|sort|uniq -c Running this on a cluster which is currently being upgraded to Jewel to Luminous it shows: 10 “ceph version 10.2.6 (656b5b63ed7c43bd014bcafd81b001959d5f089f)” 1670 […]
Do not use SMR disks with Ceph
Many new disks like the Seagate He8 disks are using a technique called Shingled Magnetic Recording to increase capacity. As these disks offer a very low price per Gigabyte they seem interesting to use in a Ceph cluster. Performance Due to the nature of SMR these disks are very, very, very bad when it comes […]
Testing Ceph BlueStore with the Kraken release
Ceph version Kraken (11.2.0) has been released and the Release Notes tell us that the new BlueStore backend for the OSDs is now available. BlueStore The current backend for the OSDs is the FileStore which mainly uses the XFS filesystem to store it’s data. To overcome several limitations of XFS and POSIX in general the […]