Chapter 4. Customizing the Storage service

The Ceph Metadata Server (MDS) runs the ceph-mds daemon, which manages metadata related to files stored on CephFS. CephFS can be consumed through NFS. For more information about using CephFS through NFS, see File System Guide and Deploying the Shared File Systems service with CephFS through NFS.

For more information, see Section 7.2, “Initiating overcloud deployment”. For more information about the Ceph Metadata Server, see Configuring Metadata Server Daemons.

The Ceph Object Gateway (RGW) provides applications with an interface to object storage capabilities within a Ceph Storage cluster. When you deploy RGW, you can replace the default Object Storage service (swift) with Ceph. For more information, see Object Gateway Configuration and Administration Guide.

For more information, see Section 7.2, “Initiating overcloud deployment”.

By default, Ceph Storage allows 250 placement groups per OSD. When you enable RGW, Ceph Storage creates six additional pools that are required by RGW. The new pools are:

Therefore, when you enable RGW, set the default pg_num by using the CephPoolDefaultPgNum parameter to account for the new pools. For more information about how to calculate the number of placement groups for Ceph pools, see Section 5.4, “Assigning custom attributes to different Ceph pools”.

The Ceph Object Gateway is a direct replacement for the default Object Storage service. As such, all other services that normally use swift can seamlessly use the Ceph Object Gateway instead without further configuration. For more information, see the Block Storage Backup Guide.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP) director supports configuring an external Ceph Object Gateway (RGW) as an Object Store service. To authenticate with the external RGW service, you must configure RGW to verify users and their roles in the Identity service (keystone).

For more information about how to configure an external Ceph Object Gateway, see Configuring the Ceph Object Gateway to use Keystone authentication in the Using Keystone with the Ceph Object Gateway Guide.

The Block Storage Backup service (cinder-backup) is disabled by default. To enable the Block Storage Backup service, complete the following steps:

Use a bonded interface to combine multiple NICs and add redundancy to a network connection. If you have enough NICs on your Ceph nodes, you can create multiple bonded interfaces on each node to expand redundancy capability.

You can then use a bonded interface for each network connection that the node requires. This provides both redundancy and a dedicated connection for each network.

The simplest implementation of bonded interfaces involves the use of two bonds, one for each storage network used by the Ceph nodes. These networks are the following:

To configure multiple bonded interfaces, you must create a new network interface template, as the director does not provide any sample templates that you can use to deploy multiple bonded NICs. However, the director does provide a template that deploys a single bonded interface. This template is /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/network/config/bond-with-vlans/ceph-storage.yaml. You can define an additional bonded interface for your additional NICs in this template.

The following snippet contains the default definition for the single bonded interface defined in the /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/network/config/bond-with-vlans/ceph-storage.yaml file:

  type: ovs_bridge // 1
  name: br-bond
  members:
    -
      type: ovs_bond // 2
      name: bond1 // 3
      ovs_options: {get_param: BondInterfaceOvsOptions} 4
      members: // 5
        -
          type: interface
          name: nic2
          primary: true
        -
          type: interface
          name: nic3
    -
      type: vlan // 6
      device: bond1 // 7
      vlan_id: {get_param: StorageNetworkVlanID}
      addresses:
        -
          ip_netmask: {get_param: StorageIpSubnet}
    -
      type: vlan
      device: bond1
      vlan_id: {get_param: StorageMgmtNetworkVlanID}
      addresses:
        -
          ip_netmask: {get_param: StorageMgmtIpSubnet}

With at least two more NICs, you can define an additional bridge and bonded interface. Then, you can move one of the VLANs to the new bonded interface, which increases throughput and reliability for both storage network connections.

When you customize the /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/network/config/bond-with-vlans/ceph-storage.yaml file for this purpose, Red Hat recommends that you use Linux bonds (type: linux_bond ) instead of the default OVS (type: ovs_bond). This bond type is more suitable for enterprise production deployments.

The following edited snippet defines an additional OVS bridge (br-bond2) which houses a new Linux bond named bond2. The bond2 interface uses two additional NICs, nic4 and nic5, and is used solely for back-end storage network traffic:

  type: ovs_bridge
  name: br-bond
  members:
    -
      type: linux_bond
      name: bond1
      bonding_options: {get_param: BondInterfaceOvsOptions} // 1
      members:
        -
          type: interface
          name: nic2
          primary: true
        -
          type: interface
          name: nic3
    -
      type: vlan
      device: bond1
      vlan_id: {get_param: StorageNetworkVlanID}
      addresses:
        -
          ip_netmask: {get_param: StorageIpSubnet}
-
  type: ovs_bridge
  name: br-bond2
  members:
    -
      type: linux_bond
      name: bond2
      bonding_options: {get_param: BondInterfaceOvsOptions}
      members:
        -
          type: interface
          name: nic4
          primary: true
        -
          type: interface
          name: nic5
    -
      type: vlan
      device: bond1
      vlan_id: {get_param: StorageMgmtNetworkVlanID}
      addresses:
        -
          ip_netmask: {get_param: StorageMgmtIpSubnet}

For the full contents of this customized template, see Appendix B, Sample custom interface template: multiple bonded interfaces.

BondInterfaceOvsOptions:
    default: ''
    description: The ovs_options string for the bond interface. Set
                 things like lacp=active and/or bond_mode=balance-slb
                 using this option.
    type: string

BondInterfaceOvsOptions:
    default: 'mode=4 lacp_rate=1'
    description: The bonding_options string for the bond interface. Set
                 things like lacp=active and/or bond_mode=balance-slb
                 using this option.
    type: string