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Mastering Ceph

Name: Mastering Ceph
Author: Nick Fisk

Nick Fisk

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240 pages
English
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eBook - ePub

Mastering Ceph

Nick Fisk

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About This Book

Deep dive into the unified, distributed storage system in order to provide excellent performanceAbout This Book• Leverage Ceph's advanced features such as erasure coding, tiering, and Bluestore• Solve large-scale problems with Ceph as a tool by understanding its strengths and weaknesses to develop the best solutions• A practical guide that covers engaging use cases to help you use advanced features of Ceph effectivelyWho This Book Is ForIf you are a developer and an administrator who has deployed a Ceph cluster before and are curious about some of the most advanced features in order to improve performance then this book is for youWhat You Will Learn•Know when and how to use some of Ceph's advanced new features • Set up a test cluster with Ansible and some virtual machines using VirtualBox and Vagrant•Develop novel solutions to massive problems with librados and shared object classes.• Choose intelligent parameters for an erasure coded pool and set it up.• Configure the Bluestore settings and see how they interact with different hardware configurations.• Keep Ceph running through thick and thin with tuning, monitoring and disaster recovery advice.In DetailMastering Ceph covers all that you need to know to use Ceph effectively. Starting with design goals and planning steps that should be undertaken to ensure successful deployments, you will be guided through to setting up and deploying the Ceph cluster, with the help of orchestration tools. Key areas of Ceph including Bluestore, Erasure coding and cache tiering will be covered with help of examples. Development of applications which use Librados and Distributed computations with shared object classes are also covered. A section on tuning will take you through the process of optimisizing both Ceph and its supporting infrastructure. Finally, you will learn to troubleshoot issues and handle various scenarios where Ceph is likely not to recover on its own.By the end of the book, you will be able to successfully deploy and operate a resilient high performance Ceph cluster.Style and approachA practical guide which has each chapter explaining the concept, sharing tips and tricks and a use case to implement the most powerful features of Ceph

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Information

Publisher

Packt Publishing

Year

2017

ISBN

9781785881282

Edition

Topic

Ciencia de la computación

Subtopic

Administración de sistemas

Disaster Recovery

In the previous chapter, you learned how to troubleshoot common Ceph problems, which, although may be affecting the operation of the cluster, weren't likely to cause a total outage or data loss. This chapter will cover more serious scenarios where the Ceph cluster is down or unresponsive. It will also cover various techniques to recover from data loss. It is to be understood that these techniques are more than capable of causing severe data loss themselves and should only be attempted as a last resort. If you have a support contract with your Ceph vendor or have a relationship with Red Hat, it is highly advisable to consult them first before carrying out any of the recovery techniques listed in this chapter.

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

How to avoid data loss
How to use RBD mirroring to provide highly available block storage
How to investigate asserts
How to rebuild monitor dbs from OSDs
How to extract PGs from a dead OSD
How to recover from lost objects or inactive PGs
How to rebuild a RBD from dead OSDs

What is a disaster?

To be able to recover from a disaster, you first have to understand and be able to recognize one. For the purpose of this chapter, we will work with the assumption that anything that leads to a sustained period of downtime is classed as a disaster. This will not cover scenarios where a failure happens that Ceph is actively working to recover from, or where it is believed that the cause is likely to be short lived. The other type of disaster is one that leads to a permanent loss of data unless recovery of the Ceph cluster is possible. Data loss is probably the most serious issue as the data may be irreplaceable or can cause serious harm to the future of the business.

Avoiding data loss

Before starting to cover some recovery techniques, it is important to cover some points discussed in Chapter 1, Planning for Ceph. Disaster recovery should be seen as a last resort; the recovery guides in this chapter should not be relied upon as a replacement for following best practices.

Firstly, make sure you have working and tested backups of your data; in the event of an outage you will feel a million times more relaxed if you know that in the worst cases, you can fall back to backups. While an outage may cause discomfort for your users or customers, informing them that their data, which they had entrusted you with, is now gone and is far worse. Also, just because you have a backup system in place, do not blindly put your trust in it. Regular test restores will mean that you will be able to rely on them when needed.

Make sure you follow some design principles also mentioned in Chapter 1, Planning for Ceph. Don't use configuration options, such as nobarrier, and strongly consider the replication level you use with in Ceph to protect your data. The chances of data loss are strongly linked to the redundancy level configured in Ceph, so careful planning is advised here.

What can cause an outage or data loss?

The majority of outages and cases of data loss will be directly caused by the loss of a number of OSDs that exceed the replication level in a short period of time. If these OSDs do not come back online, be it due to a software or hardware failure and Ceph was not able to recover objects in-between OSD failures, then these objects are now lost.

If an OSD has failed due to a failed disk, then it is unlikely that recovery will be possible unless costly disk recovery services are utilized, and there is no guarantee that any recovered data will be in a consistent state. This chapter will not cover recovering from physical disk failures and will simply suggest that the default replication level of 3 should be used to protect you against multiple disk failures.

If an OSD has failed due to a software bug, the outcome is possibly a lot more positive, but the process is complex and time-consuming. Usually an OSD, which, although the physical disk is in a good condition is unable to start, is normally linked to either a software bug or some form of corruption. A software bug may be triggered by an uncaught exception that leaves the OSD in a state that it cannot recover from. Corruption may occur after an unexpected loss of power where the hardware or software was not correctly configured to maintain data consistency. In both cases, the outlook for the OSD itself is probably terminal, and if the cluster has managed to recover from the lost OSDs, it's best just to erase and reintroduce the OSD as an empty disk.

If the number of offline OSDs has meant that all copies of an object are offline, then recovery procedures should be attempted to try and extract the objects from the failed OSDs, and insert them back into the cluster.

RBD mirroring

As mentioned previously, working backups are a key strategy in ensuring that a failure does not result in the loss of data. Starting with the Jewel release, Ceph introduced RBD mirroring, which allows you to asynchronously mirror an RBD from one cluster to another. Note the difference between Cephs native replication, which is synchronous, and RBD mirroring. With synchronous replication, low latency between peers is essential, and asynchronous replication allows the two Ceph clusters to be geographically remote, as latency is no longer a factor.

By having a replicated copy of your RBD images on a separate cluster, you can dramatically reduce both your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The RTO is a measure of how long it takes from initiating recovery to when the data is usable. It is the worst case measurement of time between each data point and describes the expected data loss. A daily backup would have an RPO of 24 hours; for example, potentially, any data written up to 24 hours since the last backup would be lost if you had to restore from a backup.

With RBD mirroring, data is asynchronously replicated to the target RBD, and so, in most cases, the RPO should be under a minute. As the target RBD is also a replica and not a backup that would require to be first restored, the RTO is also likely going to be extremely low. Additionally, as the target RBD is stored on a separate Ceph cluster, it offers additional protection over snapshots, which could also be impacted if the Ceph cluster itself experiences issues. At first glance, this makes RBD mirroring seem like the perfect tool t...