February 2024 – en.vmik.net

Connecting Ceph clients. File access with CephFS

With this article, I close the series on the basics of Ceph deployment. Previously, we looked at how to deploy Ceph, and how block and object access is provided.

This article will briefly describe the procedure for providing file access in Ceph using CephFS. This topic is very extensive and a lot may be missed, so please refer to the official documentation for more information.

Connecting Ceph clients. Ceph Object Gateway and S3

In addition to block and file data access, Ceph also supports object access via the S3 or Swift protocols.

In this case, we will look at what settings need to be made on the Ceph side to provide clients with the ability to store data using the S3 protocol.

Let me remind you that I previously described the procedure for installing Ceph Reef from scratch in this article. In this case, I use the same platform, as well as a client based on Rocky Linux 9.

Also, I previously wrote about connecting block devices using RBD here.

Considerations about changes in Time Zones in Kazakhstan and how to deal with it in Linux

On the 00:00 1st of March 2024, Kazakhstan changes the clocks to a single time zone UTC +5 for the whole country. It will affect two time zones: Asia/Almaty and Asia/Qostanay, which are in UTC +6 and need to be adjusted.

And the question may arise – what to do?

As this blog is more about Virtualization, one thing to mention: there are not many problems. Most hypervisors work in the UTC +0 time zone, and the time zone should be correct inside the Guest Virtual Machines.

Many people ask: Will the NTP server move my clock back for an hour? The answer is no. NTP servers work in the UTC +0. And on the 1st of March, they won’t move your clock backward.

In this article, we will look briefly at Linux systems and how to change the time.

Connecting Ceph clients. Block devices – RBD

RBD, aka RADOS Block Device, as you might guess from the name, allows you to allocate space from Ceph and present it to clients as block devices (disks).

RBD can often be found in conjunction with virtualization, in Kubernetes, where disks are connected to containers as PV, and also inside the client OS.

In this case, we will look at how to connect block devices with Ceph to a regular Linux host.

Deploying Ceph Reef cluster using cephadm

The last time I had a chance to work with Ceph was the release of Nautilus (14), several years ago.

Since then, some aspects have changed in the procedure for creating and managing the Ceph cluster.

In this article, I plan to refresh my knowledge on deploying Ceph based on Reef release (18) as an example.