Building Your First Ceph Cluster for OpenStack— Fighting for Performance, Solving Tradeoffs Over the course of the last 12 months, Ceph has enjoyed the growing perception of becoming a “default” open-source scale-out storage platform to power all storage-related aspects of an OpenStack cloud (block, object, image, ephemeral—you name it). At Mirantis, we’ve been pioneering the adoption of the “combo” made of these two platforms with our customers and partners—by offering "out of the box” support for Ceph in our tools, testing which configurations and architectures work better, and helping fix bugs in upstream integration.
For new users, it can be a challenge to plan your future Ceph deployment and make sure it will work with OpenStack. There are lots of things to consider—hardware, performance targets, configuration optimization—and still there's relatively little published advice or proven reference architectures. A mistake in the storage planning stage may be costly later—applications will run slowly, and expensive hardware may appear underutilized.
In this talk, speakers from Mirantis will share practical advice and lessons learned (sometimes the hard way) on what it takes to power an OpenStack cloud with Ceph, including:
- How to figure out your use case(s) for Ceph-powered OpenStack
- What works with Ceph, and what doesn’t (yet?)
- Performance you can expect for the amount of money spent
- Which hardware to choose
- Sizing tips and guidelines (expect some magic numbers and “rules of thumb” here)
- Small details that matter—what SSDs to pick for journaling, HBA, or RAID
- Design examples
- Higher density, lower cost
- Lower density, better performance
- “What if I want to go full SSD?!"
- Deployment and integration with OpenStack
- Tools available, typical architectures for Ceph and OpenStack components
- Operating tips
- “Do’s” and “Dont’s" - sometimes learned the hard way
- What “global” problems we see in Ceph as of today and the way to resolve them in the future
Join us to learn what it takes to run Ceph today and whether it makes sense for your specific environment.
