Configuring Ceph with Custom Config Settings¶

Deploying an Overcloud with Ceph¶

TripleO can deploy and configure Ceph as if it was a composable OpenStack service and configure OpenStack services like Nova, Glance, Cinder, Cinder Backup, and Gnocchi to use it as a storage backend.

Prior to Pike, TripleO deployed Ceph with puppet-ceph. With the Pike release it is possible to use TripleO to deploy Ceph with either ceph-ansible or puppet-ceph, though puppet-ceph is deprecated. To deploy Ceph in containers use ceph-ansible, for which only a containerized Ceph deployment is possible. It is not possible to deploy a containerized Ceph with puppet-ceph.

To deploy with Ceph include either of the appropriate environment files. For puppet-ceph use “environments/puppet-ceph.yaml” like the following:

openstack overcloud deploy --templates -e /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/environments/puppet-ceph.yaml

For ceph-ansible use “environments/ceph-ansible/ceph-ansible.yaml” like the following:

openstack overcloud deploy --templates -e /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/environments/ceph-ansible/ceph-ansible.yaml

When using ceph-ansible to deploy Ceph in containers, the process described in the Container Image Preparation documentation will configure the deployment to use the appropriate Ceph docker image. However, it is also possible to override the default docker image. For example:

parameter_defaults:
  DockerCephDaemonImage: ceph/daemon:tag-stable-3.0-jewel-centos-7

In both the puppet-ceph and ceph-ansible examples above, at least one Ceph storage node is required. The following example will configure one Ceph storage nodes on servers matching the ceph-storage profile. It will also set the default pool size, the number of times that an object should be written for data protection, to one. These parameter_defaults may be saved in an environment file “~/my-ceph-settings.yaml” and added to the deploy commandline:

parameter_defaults:
  OvercloudCephStorageFlavor: ceph-storage
  CephStorageCount: 1
  CephDefaultPoolSize: 1

The values above are only appropriate for a development or POC deployment. The default pool size is three but if there are less than three Ceph OSDs, then the cluster will never reach status HEALTH_OK because it has no place to make additional copies. Thus, a POC deployment with less than three OSDs should override the default default pool size. However, a production deployment should replace both of the ones above with threes, or greater, in order to have at least three storage nodes and at least three back up copies of each object at minimum.

Customizing ceph.conf with puppet-ceph¶

Ceph demands for more careful configuration when deployed at scale.

It is possible to override any of the configuration parameters supported by puppet-ceph at deployment time via Heat environment files. For example:

parameter_defaults:
  ExtraConfig:
    ceph::profile::params::osd_journal_size: 2048

will customize the default osd_journal_size overriding any default provided in the ceph.yaml static hieradata.

It is also possible to provide arbitrary stanza/key/value lines for ceph.conf using the special ceph::conf configuration class. For example by using:

parameter_defaults:
  ExtraConfig:
    ceph::conf::args:
      global/max_open_files:
        value: 131072
      global/my_setting:
        value: my_value

the resulting ceph.conf file should be populated with the following:

[global]
max_open_files: 131072
my_setting: my_value

To specify a set of dedicated block devices to use as Ceph OSDs use the following:

parameter_defaults:
  ExtraConfig:
    ceph::profile::params::osds:
      '/dev/sdb':
        journal: '/dev/sde'
      '/dev/sdc':
        journal: '/dev/sde'
      '/dev/sdd':
        journal: '/dev/sde'

The above will produce three OSDs which run on /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, and /dev/sdd which all journal to /dev/sde. This same setup will be duplicated per Ceph storage node and assumes uniform hardware.

The parameter_defaults like the above may be saved in an environment file “~/my-ceph-settings.yaml” and added to the deploy commandline:

openstack overcloud deploy --templates -e /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/environments/puppet-ceph.yaml -e ~/my-ceph-settings.yaml

Customizing ceph.conf with ceph-ansible¶

The playbooks provided by ceph-ansible are triggered by a Mistral workflow. A new CephAnsibleExtraConfig parameter has been added to the templates and can be used to provide arbitrary config variables consumed by ceph-ansible. The pre-existing template params consumed by the TripleO Pike release to drive puppet-ceph continue to work and are translated, when possible, into their equivalent ceph-ansible variable.

For example, to encrypt the data stored on OSDs use the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephAnsibleExtraConfig:
    dmcrypt: true

The above example may be used to change any of the defaults found in ceph-ansible/group_vars.

If a parameter to override is not an available group variable, then global settings in the ceph.conf may be set directly using CephConfigOverrides like the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephConfigOverrides:
    max_open_files: 131072

To change the backfill and recovery operations that Ceph uses to rebalance a cluster, use an example like the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephConfigOverrides:
    osd_recovery_op_priority: 3
    osd_recovery_max_active: 3
    osd_max_backfills: 1

Configure container settings with ceph-ansible¶

The group variables ceph_osd_docker_memory_limit, which corresponds to docker run ... --memory, and ceph_osd_docker_cpu_limit, which corresponds to docker run ... --cpu-quota, may be overridden depending on the hardware configuration and the system needs. Below is an example of setting custom values to these parameters:

parameter_defaults:
  CephAnsibleExtraConfig:
    ceph_osd_docker_memory_limit: 3g
    ceph_osd_docker_cpu_limit: 1

Configure OSD settings with ceph-ansible¶

To specify a set of dedicated block devices to use as Ceph OSDs, use a variation of the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephAnsibleDisksConfig:
    devices:
      - /dev/sdb
      - /dev/sdc
      - /dev/sdd
    dedicated_devices:
      - /dev/sde
      - /dev/sde
      - /dev/sde
    osd_scenario: non-collocated

The above will produce three OSDs which run on /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, and /dev/sdd which all journal to /dev/sde. This same setup will be duplicated per Ceph storage node and assumes uniform hardware. If the journals will reside on the same disks as the OSDs then the above should be changed to the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephAnsibleDisksConfig:
    devices:
      - /dev/sdb
      - /dev/sdc
      - /dev/sdd
    osd_scenario: collocated

The number of OSDs in a Ceph deployment should proportionally affect the number of Ceph PGs per Pool as determined by Ceph’s pgcalc. When the appropriate default pool size and PG number are determined, the defaults should be overridden using an example like the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephPoolDefaultSize: 3
  CephPoolDefaultPgNum: 128

Customize OpenStack Ceph Pools¶

In addition to setting the default PG number for each pool created, each Ceph pool created for OpenStack can have its own PG number. TripleO supports customization of these values by using a syntax like the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephPools:
    - {"name": backups, "pg_num": 512, "pgp_num": 512}
    - {"name": volumes, "pg_num": 1024, "pgp_num": 1024, "rule_name": 'replicated_rule', "erasure_profile": '', "expected_num_objects": 6000}
    - {"name": vms, "pg_num": 512, "pgp_num": 512}
    - {"name": images, "pg_num": 128, "pgp_num": 128}

In the above example, PG numbers for each pool differ based on the OpenStack use case from pgcalc. The example above also passes additional options as described in the ceph osd pool create documentation to the volumes pool used by Cinder.

Override Ansible run options¶

TripleO runs the ceph-ansible site-docker.yml.sample playbook by default. The values in this playbook should be overridden as described in this document and the playbooks themselves should not be modified. However, it is possible to specify which playbook is run using the following parameter:

parameter_defaults:
  CephAnsiblePlaybook: /usr/share/ceph-ansible/site-docker.yml.sample

For each TripleO Ceph deployment, the above playbook’s output is logged to /var/log/mistral/ceph-install-workflow.log. The default verbosity of the playbook run is 0. The example below sets the verbosity to 3:

parameter_defaults:
  CephAnsiblePlaybookVerbosity: 3

During the playbook run temporary files, like the Ansible inventory and the ceph-ansible parameters that are passed as overrides as described in this document, are stored on the undercloud in a directory that matches the pattern /tmp/ansible-mistral-action*. This directory is deleted at the end of each Mistral workflow which triggers the playbook run. However, the temporary files are not deleted when the verbosity is greater than 0. This option is helpful when debugging.

The Ansible environment variables may be overridden using an example like the following:

parameter_defaults:
  CephAnsibleEnvironmentVariables:
    ANSIBLE_SSH_RETRIES: '6'
    DEFAULT_FORKS: '25'

In the above example, the number of SSH retries is increased from the default to prevent timeouts. Ansible’s fork number is automatically limited to the number of possible hosts at runtime. TripleO uses ceph-ansible to configure Ceph clients in addition to Ceph servers so when deploying a large number of compute nodes ceph-ansible may consume a lot of memory on the undercloud. Lowering the fork count will reduce the memory footprint while the Ansible playbook is running at the expense of the number of hosts configured in parallel.

Applying ceph-ansible customizations to a overcloud deployment¶

The desired options from the ceph-ansible examples above to customize the ceph.conf, container, OSD or Ansible options may be combined under one parameter_defaults setting and saved in an environment file “~/my-ceph-settings.yaml” and added to the deploy commandline:

openstack overcloud deploy --templates -e /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/environments/ceph-ansible/ceph-ansible.yaml -e ~/my-ceph-settings.yaml

Already Deployed Servers and ceph-ansible¶

When using ceph-ansible and Using Already Deployed Servers, it is necessary to run commands like the following from the undercloud before deployment:

export OVERCLOUD_HOSTS="192.168.1.8 192.168.1.42"
bash /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/deployed-server/scripts/enable-ssh-admin.sh

In the example above, the OVERCLOUD_HOSTS variable should be set to the IPs of the overcloud hosts which will be Ceph servers or which will host Ceph clients (e.g. Nova, Cinder, Glance, Gnocchi, Manila, etc.). The enable-ssh-admin.sh script configures a user on the overcloud nodes that Ansible uses to configure Ceph.