02 Sep 2012, 00:00

linux / ceph

After my last failed attempt at Installing Ceph on SL6 or rather my attempt at configuring Ceph for a test failed miserably.

It hasn’t deterred me to test more. As a result I setup a number of Vagrant Virtual machines and got together a few puppet scripts to provision machines.

Here’s a sample manifest for puppet to automate the deployment of a machine to build Ceph. It requires that you SL6 environment to have at least the epel repository enabled.

Here’s also a sample Vagrantfile to get one started

{% codeblock Vagrantfile lang:ruby %}

-- mode: ruby --

vi: set ft=ruby :

For vagrant configuration options please go to http://vagrantup.com/v1/docs/index.html

Vagrant::Config.run do |global_config|

All Vagrant configuration is done here. The most common configuration

options are documented and commented below. For a complete reference,

please see the online documentation at vagrantup.com.

Every Vagrant virtual environment requires a box to build off of.

We default to using SL which is a RHEL clone

global_config.vm.box = “sl63-x86_64” global_config.vm.box_url = “http://thammuz.tchpc.tcd.ie/mirrors/boxes/scientificlinux-6.3-x86_64-netboot-devops.box" cephServers.each do |name, opts| global_config.vm.define name do |ceph| # uncomment the following line if you want the basebox to start in gui mode #ceph.vm.boot_mode = :gui ceph.vm.network :hostonly, opts[:network] ceph.vm.host_name = opts[:host_name]

  ceph.vm.provision :puppet, :facter => { "ceph_node_name" => "ceph@#{opts[:network]}" } do |puppet|
    puppet.manifest_file = "site.pp"
    puppet.manifests_path = 'puppet/manifests'
    puppet.module_path = ['puppet/modules', 'puppet/services']
    #puppet.options = "--verbose --debug"
  end

ceph.vm.customize [
  "modifyvm", :id,
  "--name", opts[:host_name],
  "--memory", "1024"
]

end

end

{% endcodeblock %}

With the Virtual Machines I was able to download the latest Ceph 0.51 and do at least the following

unpack the tarball
do a ./configure to generate the ceph.spec file
copy (or move) the ceph tarball into ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
execute a rpmbuild -ba ceph.spec to build the source and binary rpm packages for installation

After the RPM’s were built and installed, I again followed the quick guide at http://ceph.com/docs/master/start/quick-start/ and was able to setup a small 3 node cluster for playing around with.

So to note, I tried out the cephfs feature (via the fuse module) and creating(destroying and resizing) RBD’s. I haven’t had a chance to experiment with the kernel modules to actually do something useful with the POSIX filesystem or RBD’s that Ceph provides.

It would be worth nothing that the Ceph project are working on providing prebuilt RPM’s soon, there is already a gitbuilder instance for the rpm build or just go to their gitbuilder aggregator

scientific linux 6 build environment for ceph