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 […]
Deploying Ceph over IPv6
I like to deploy Ceph clusters over IPv6. I actually think that’s the way forward. IPv4 is legacy just like iSCSI and NFS are. Last week I was at a customer deploying a new Ceph cluster and they wanted to deploy with IPv6! Most deployment I did with IPv6 were done manually and not with […]
Calculating RADOS objects for RBD images
Ceph’s RBD (RADOS Block Device) is just a thin wrapper on top of RADOS, the object store of Ceph. It stripes (by default) over 4MB objects in RADOS. It’s very simple to calculate which RADOS object corresponds with which sector on your RBD image/block device. First you have to find out the block device’s object […]
Safely backing up your Ceph monitors
So you might wonder: Why do I need to make a backup of my Ceph monitors? I have multiple monitors. That’s true, but would you run into the very unfortunate situation where you loose all you monitors, you loose all your data. The monitors contain very important metadata (pgmap, osdmap, crushmap) to run your cluster. […]
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 […]
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 […]