Book Image

Ceph Cookbook

Book Image

Ceph Cookbook

Overview of this book

Ceph is a unified, distributed storage system designed for excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. This cutting-edge technology has been transforming the storage industry, and is evolving rapidly as a leader in software-defined storage space, extending full support to cloud platforms such as Openstack and Cloudstack, including virtualization platforms. It is the most popular storage backend for Openstack, public, and private clouds, so is the first choice for a storage solution. Ceph is backed by RedHat and is developed by a thriving open source community of individual developers as well as several companies across the globe. This book takes you from a basic knowledge of Ceph to an expert understanding of the most advanced features, walking you through building up a production-grade Ceph storage cluster and helping you develop all the skills you need to plan, deploy, and effectively manage your Ceph cluster. Beginning with the basics, you’ll create a Ceph cluster, followed by block, object, and file storage provisioning. Next, you’ll get a step-by-step tutorial on integrating it with OpenStack and building a Dropbox-like object storage solution. We’ll also take a look at federated architecture and CephFS, and you’ll dive into Calamari and VSM for monitoring the Ceph environment. You’ll develop expert knowledge on troubleshooting and benchmarking your Ceph storage cluster. Finally, you’ll get to grips with the best practices to operate Ceph in a production environment.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Ceph Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Ceph placement group


A Placement Group (PG) is a logical collection of objects that are replicated on OSDs to provide reliability in a storage system. Depending on the replication level of a Ceph pool, each PG is replicated and distributed on more than one OSD of a Ceph cluster. You can consider a PG as a logical container holding multiple objects, such that this logical container is mapped to multiple OSDs.

The PGs are essential for the scalability and performance of a Ceph storage system. Without PGs, it will be difficult to manage and track tens of millions of objects that are replicated and spread over hundreds of OSDs. The management of these objects without a PG will also result in a computational penalty. Instead of managing every object individually, a system has to manage the PGs with numerous objects. This makes Ceph a more manageable and less complex system.

Each PG requires some system resources, as they have to manage multiple objects. The number of PGs in a cluster should be...