HOWTO OpenStack Grizzly and Ceph with Puppet on Ubuntu 12.04

For months I’ve asked people working with puppet modules on a daily basis for a HOWTO that I could follow to setup a new cluster with the Grizzly OpenStack release. Such a HOWTO is not needed for people who develop the modules or deploy OpenStack for a living. It is however very helpful for the casual system administrator willing to get it running in a few hours, all by herself/himself.
The packstack seems to be exactly that : a walkthru of a well tested procedure that anyone with a basic understanding of what OpenStack is can rely on. It requires an RPM based distribution and this may be a significant effort for someone used to DEB based operating systems.
For Ubuntu users, the kickstack project was started in summer 2013 and targets hands on sessions, with the declared goal to make it easy for people new to both OpenStack and puppet. Later on, it inspired Dan Bode to use a new approach based on dependency injection to implement openstack-installer for Cisco.
The proposed HOWTO uses openstack-installer to deploy OpenStack against an existing Ceph cluster and provides:

  • keystone
  • nova ( kvm )
  • quantum ( openvswitch + gre )
  • cinder ( Ceph backend )
  • horizon
  • glance ( Ceph backend )

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gerritexec: continuous integration one-liner

gerritexec is a command line tool listening to gerrit on a designated project. On each new patchset, it will:

  • git clone the project
  • git pull the patchset
  • cd in the git tree and run a script
  • positively review the patchset ( +1 ) if the program exit(0)
  • negatively review the patchset ( -1 ) otherwise

For instance It can be used to run the integration tests found in the git tree of the stackforge/puppet-ceph project:

GEM_HOME=~/.gems gerritexec --hostname review.openstack.org \
           --username puppetceph \
           --script ' ( bundle install ; bundle exec rake spec:system ) > /tmp/out 2>&1 ; r=$? ; pastebinit /tmp/out ; exit $r #' \
           --project stackforge/puppet-ceph

Larger projects should consider using zuul or a gerrit jenkins plugin.
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OpenStack + Ceph on junk hardware and hazardous hosting

OpenStack is installed with puppet and configured to use a Ceph cluster installed with ceph-deploy. The hardware is composed of about 25 heterogeneous HP machines that are over three years old. Five of them have been racked in a basement that not as dry as it should be. The 100Mb/s Internet connection uses a 30m category 5 cable going through two holes in the walls before reaching the rack.
The cluster will be connected to other similar clusters to reduce the risk of loosing data.

Junk hardware, in a basement

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Fully automated disks life cycle in a Ceph cluster

Adding, moving and removing disks in a Ceph cluster can easily be automated and require no manual intervention. New disks are formatted when the configuration tool ( Puppet, Chef etc. ) notices they are unknown according to ceph-disk. When disks are removed for whatever reason, Ceph recovers the information it contained, as expected. If disks are hot plugged from one machine to another, udev rules will automatically allow them to rejoin the cluster and update the crush map accordingly.
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from zero to ceph in five seconds

The micro-osd bash script is 91 lines long and creates a Ceph cluster with a single OSD and a single MON in less that five seconds

$ time bash micro-osd.sh single-osd
starting osd.0 at :/0 osd_data single-osd/osd single-osd/osd.journal
# id    weight  type name       up/down reweight
-1      1       root default
0       1               osd.0   up      1
export CEPH_ARGS='--conf single-osd/ceph.conf'
ceph osd tree
real    0m4.677s

It is meant to be used for integration tests, for example in the context of the openstack-installer puppet manifest to deploy OpenStack. Ceph is configured to run from a directory, on a single host, without cephx, in a non privileged environment and uses about 100MB of disk space.

$ du -sh single-osd/
103M    single-osd/

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setting up an openstack-installer test environment

openstack-installer is a data oriented replacement of puppet-openstack. The following HOWTO runs some basic tests on vagrant virtual machines that are preserved for introspection with:

# vagrant status
control_basevm           running
# vagrant ssh control_basevm
vagrant@control-server:~$ ps -ax | grep keystone
15020 ?        Ss     0:01 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/keystone-all

The control_basevm runs the horizon dashboard:

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Ceph use case : proteomic analysis

The UMR de Génétique Végétale is a state funded french research facility located in a historical monument: a large farm surrounded by fields harvested for experiments. Johann Joets was assigned a most unusual mission : setup a state of the art datacenter in a former pigsty. His colleague Olivier Langella does the system administration for PAPPSO and researched an extendable storage solution able to transparently sustain the loss of any hardware component. A simple Ceph setup was chosen and is in use since 2012.

The roof above the pigsty turned into machine room
R515 Ceph node and switch on top

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