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

Understanding Ceph Filesystem and MDS


The Ceph Filesystem offers the POSIX-compliant distributed filesystem of any size that uses Ceph RADOS to store its data. To implement Ceph filesystem, you need a running Ceph storage cluster and at least one Ceph Metadata Serer (MDS) to manage its metadata and keep it separated from data, which helps in reducing complexity and improves reliability. The following diagram depicts the architectural view of CephFS and its interfaces:

libcephfs libraries play an important role in supporting its multiple client implementations. It has the native Linux kernel driver support and thus clients can use native filesystem mounting, for example, using the mount command. It has tight integration with SAMBA and support for CIFS and SMB. CephFS extends its support to Filesystem in USErspace (FUSE) using cephfuse modules. It also allows direct application interaction with the RADOS cluster using libcephfs libraries. CephFS is gaining popularity as a replacement for Hadoop...