Open Stack

hi,

we introduced support for the deployment of Ceph in the liberty release 
so that it could optionally be used as backend for one or more of 
Cinder, Glance, Nova and more recently Gnocchi.

We used to deploy Ceph MONs on the controller nodes and Ceph OSDs on 
dedicated ceph-storage nodes so a deployment of OpenStack with Ceph 
would need at least 1 more additional node to host a Ceph OSD.

In our HA scenario the storage backends are configured as follows:

Glance -> Swift
Nova (ephemeral) -> Local
Cinder (persistent) -> LVM (on controllers)
Gnocchi -> Swift

The downside of the above configuration is that Cinder volumes can not 
be replicated across the controller nodes and become unavailable if a 
controller fails, while production environments generally expect 
persistent storage to be highly available. Cinder volumes instead could 
even get lost completely in case of a permanent failure of a controller.

With the Newton release and the composable roles we can now deploy Ceph 
OSDs on the compute nodes, removing the requirement we had for an 
additional node to host a Ceph OSD.

I would like to ask for some feedback on the possibility of deploying 
Ceph by default in the HA scenario and use it as backend for Cinder.

Also using Swift as backend for Glance and Gnocchi is enough to cover 
the availability issue for the data, but it also means we're storing 
that data on the controller nodes which might or might not be wanted; I 
don't see a strong reason for defaulting them to Ceph, but it might make 
more sense when Ceph is available; feedback about this would be 
appreciated as well.

Finally a shared backend (Ceph) for Nova would allow live migrations but 
probably decrease performances for the guests in general; so I'd be 
against defaulting Nova to Ceph. Feedback?
-- 
Giulio Fidente
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