The road to Havana is long, no milestone in the corner yet, but already some enhancements have been brought to the Horizon interface. Let’s take a quick look at the new fancy stuff!

What a perfect picture, a Cephalopod smoking a cigar! Updates! The OpenStack developer summit was great and obviously one of the most exciting session was the one about the Ceph integration with OpenStack. I had the great pleasure to attend this session (led by Josh Durgin from Inktank). The session was too short, but we had enough time to discuss upcoming features and establish a proper roadmap. With the help of this article, I’d like to share some of the discussions that we had and blueprints that we wrote.

Quick Nova API CLI updates.

Archiving deleted rows made easy by Grizzly.

How-to quickly deploy a MDS server.

The title of the article is not that explicit, actually I had trouble to find a proper one. Thus let me clarify a bit. Here is the context I was wondering if Glance was capable of converting images within its store. The quick answer is no, but I think such feature is worth to be implemented. Glance could be able to convert a QCOW2 image to a RAW format. Usually if you already have an image within let’s say a Ceph cluster (RBD), you have to download the image (since you probably don’t have the source image file anymore), then manually convert it with qemu-img (QCOW2 –> RAW) and eventually import it into Glance. Enough talk about this, I’ll address this in a future article. For now let’s stick to the first matter. Imagine that you have a KVM cluster backed by a Ceph Cluster and your CTO wants you to migrate the whole environment to OpenStack because it’s trendy (joking, OpenStack just rocks!). You’re not going to backup all your images and then build a new cluster or something like that, you might want OpenStack (Glance) to be aware of your Ceph cluster. Generally speaking you just have to connect Glance to one of your image pool. After this, the only thing to do is to create (it’s more registering the images ID and metadata than creating a new image) into Glance. No worries here’s the explanation. Longest introduction ever.

It’s a bit late that I’m happy to share our talk (with Emilien Macchi) at the OpenStack Summit. Ok that was my first talk, so please be gentle ^^. In the meantime, here the video. In this presentation, we shared 2 HA reference architectures for OpenStack.

Slides are available on Slideshare

See you in Hong Kong! Cheers!

Grizzly brought the multi-backend functionality to cinder and tons of new drivers. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate how we can take advantage of the tiering capability of Ceph.

Materials to start playing with Ceph. This Vagrant box contains a all-in-one Ceph installation.

Sometimes it’s just funny to experiment the theory, just to notice “oh well it works as expected”. This is why today I’d like to share some experiments with 2 really specific flags: noout and nodown. Behaviors describe in the article are well known because of the design of Ceph, so don’t yell at me: ‘Tell us something we don’t know!’, simply see this article a set of exercises that demonstrate some Ceph internal functions :-).