Firstly apologies for coming to this topic so late - I evidently missed the original deprecation at caracal and only tracked onto the removal of the protocol helper when I was debugging an issue in a Caracal deployment today.
Hi zorillas!
As per subject line, we will be deprecating the standalone CephFS NFS protocol helper in this cycle.
This is following our deprecation warning we put out in 2024.1 / Caracal [1] [2].
We've supported using a clustered Ceph NFS service since the Zed release.
We've also added upgrade helpers to migrate from a standalone NFS-Ganesha service to the ceph-orch-deployed clustered NFS service; this code was backported to stable/2023.1 (Antelope).
Although the upgrade path is disruptive, there is a UX improvement in Manila to ease this migration through surfacing “preferred” export paths.
Moving forward, deployments must have “cephfs_nfs_cluster_id” in your configuration, otherwise the driver will fail to start.
Manila will not make any export changes to NFS-Ganesha, so upgrading manila without an NFS cluster will mean that only the control plane is not going to work; but, data plane will remain unaffected.
To assist migration, admins can also configure "cephfs_ganesha_export_ips" (or alternatively, "cephfs_ganesha_server_ip") alongside "cephfs_nfs_cluster_id".
Setting these options will allow the CephFS driver to report additional export paths. These additional export paths will have the "preferred" metadata key set to False.
I appreciate that the cephadm/ceph orchestrator has become a popular way to deploy and manage Ceph.
As a core developer in the OpenStack Charms (which already uses this feature) and Sunbeam (which was planning to) projects I'm concerned that this tightly couples use of CephFS+Ganesha NFS and Manila with a specific choice of deployment tooling.
Looking at the last Ceph user survey [0] there many choices on how to deploy and operate Ceph - the Ceph orchestrator does account for 30% but other popular tools are also well represented:
Removing this feature would challenge our ability to deliver Ceph integrated Manila through the Sunbeam project.
Is this a done deal or can we still consider not removing this helper for the ceph drivers going forward?
Thanks
James