architecture help (iscsi, rbd, backups?)
Hey guys and girls, I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment. SUMMARY I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow performance, still working on that. But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap. My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components should not be part of that of course. If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway. GOALS My goals/considerations are: - we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. - focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). - I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's. THE INITIAL PLAN Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups. My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff. CURRENT SITUATION I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd? In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable. Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance. And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;) By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images. If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts on my questions! Angelo.
From: Angelo Höngens <angelo@hongens.nl> Sent: April 27, 2023 6:06 PM To: ceph-users@ceph.io Subject: [ceph-users] architecture help (iscsi, rbd, backups?)
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow
Hey Angelo, Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, the main idea for the use case is to be able to present Ceph storage to windows clients as SMB? If so, you can absolutely use CephFS to get that done. This is something we do all the time with our cluster configurations, if we're looking to present ceph storage to windows clients for the use case of a file server is our standard choice, and to your point of security/ACLs we can make use of joining the samba server that to an existing active directory, and then assigning permissions through Windows. I will provide a high level overview of an average setup to hopefully explain it better, and of course if you have any questions please let me know. I understand that this is way different of a setup of what you currently have planned, but it's a different choice that could prove useful in your case. Essentially how it works is we have ceph cluster with CephFS configured, of which we map CephFS kernel mounts onto some gateway nodes, at which point we expose to clients via CTDB with SMB shares (CTDB for high availability). i.e ceph cluster > ceph fs > map cephfs kernel mount on linux client > create smb share on top of cephfs kernel mount > connect to samba share with windows clients. The SMB gateway nodes hosting samba also can be joined to an Active Directory to allow setting Windows ACL permissions to allow more in depth control of ACLs. Also I will say +1 for the RBD driver on Windows, something we also make use of a lot and have a lot of success with. Again, please let me know if you need any insight or clarification, or have any further questions. Hope this is of assistance. Regards, Bailey -----Original Message----- performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI
gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components
should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can
iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for
- focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different
- I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is
research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows
file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an
image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff
going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts
on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email
to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io
There is also a direct RBD client for MS Windows, though it's relatively young.
On Apr 27, 2023, at 18:20, Bailey Allison <ballison@45drives.com> wrote:
Hey Angelo,
Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, the main idea for the use case is to be able to present Ceph storage to windows clients as SMB?
If so, you can absolutely use CephFS to get that done. This is something we do all the time with our cluster configurations, if we're looking to present ceph storage to windows clients for the use case of a file server is our standard choice, and to your point of security/ACLs we can make use of joining the samba server that to an existing active directory, and then assigning permissions through Windows.
I will provide a high level overview of an average setup to hopefully explain it better, and of course if you have any questions please let me know. I understand that this is way different of a setup of what you currently have planned, but it's a different choice that could prove useful in your case.
Essentially how it works is we have ceph cluster with CephFS configured, of which we map CephFS kernel mounts onto some gateway nodes, at which point we expose to clients via CTDB with SMB shares (CTDB for high availability).
i.e
ceph cluster > ceph fs > map cephfs kernel mount on linux client > create smb share on top of cephfs kernel mount > connect to samba share with windows clients.
The SMB gateway nodes hosting samba also can be joined to an Active Directory to allow setting Windows ACL permissions to allow more in depth control of ACLs.
Also I will say +1 for the RBD driver on Windows, something we also make use of a lot and have a lot of success with.
Again, please let me know if you need any insight or clarification, or have any further questions. Hope this is of assistance.
Regards,
Bailey
From: Angelo Höngens <angelo@hongens.nl> Sent: April 27, 2023 6:06 PM To: ceph-users@ceph.io Subject: [ceph-users] architecture help (iscsi, rbd, backups?)
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow
-----Original Message----- performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI
gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components
should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can
iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for
- focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different
- I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is
research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows
file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an
image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff
going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts
on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email
to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io
Bailey, Thanks for your extensive reply, you got me down the wormhole of CephFS and SMB (and looking at a lot of 45drives videos and knowledge base, Houston dashboard, reading up on CTDB, etc), and this is a really interesting option as well! Thanks for the write-up. By the way, are you using the RBD driver in Windows in production with your customers? The binaries are still called beta, and last time I tried it in a proof of concept setup (a while back), it would never connect and always crash out on me. After reporting an issue, I did not get a response for almost three months before a dev responded that it was an unsupported ipv6 issue. Not a problem, and all very understandable, it's open source software written mostly by volunteers, but I got a bit cautious about deploying this to production ;) Angelo. On 27/04/2023 18:20, Bailey Allison wrote:
Hey Angelo,
Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, the main idea for the use case is to be able to present Ceph storage to windows clients as SMB?
If so, you can absolutely use CephFS to get that done. This is something we do all the time with our cluster configurations, if we're looking to present ceph storage to windows clients for the use case of a file server is our standard choice, and to your point of security/ACLs we can make use of joining the samba server that to an existing active directory, and then assigning permissions through Windows.
I will provide a high level overview of an average setup to hopefully explain it better, and of course if you have any questions please let me know. I understand that this is way different of a setup of what you currently have planned, but it's a different choice that could prove useful in your case.
Essentially how it works is we have ceph cluster with CephFS configured, of which we map CephFS kernel mounts onto some gateway nodes, at which point we expose to clients via CTDB with SMB shares (CTDB for high availability).
i.e
ceph cluster > ceph fs > map cephfs kernel mount on linux client > create smb share on top of cephfs kernel mount > connect to samba share with windows clients.
The SMB gateway nodes hosting samba also can be joined to an Active Directory to allow setting Windows ACL permissions to allow more in depth control of ACLs.
Also I will say +1 for the RBD driver on Windows, something we also make use of a lot and have a lot of success with.
Again, please let me know if you need any insight or clarification, or have any further questions. Hope this is of assistance.
Regards,
Bailey
From: Angelo Höngens <angelo@hongens.nl> Sent: April 27, 2023 6:06 PM To: ceph-users@ceph.io Subject: [ceph-users] architecture help (iscsi, rbd, backups?)
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow
-----Original Message----- performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI
gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components
should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can
iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for
- focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different
- I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is
research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows
file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an
image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff
going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts
on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email
to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io
Hey Angelo, Ya, we are using the RBD driver for quite a few customers in production, and it is working quite good! Hahahaha, I am familiar with the bug you are talking about I think, I believe that may be resolved by now. I believe the driver is either out of beta now/soon to be out of beta? I recall watching a talk by the developers where they mentioned it should be out of beta soon or already is, in addition I want to say they are also/would also eventually be offering a paid support for it, but can't say for certain on that. Otherwise though like I said we are using it for quite a few customers with some really good success. Also, if you have any further questions re: CephFS and SMB please feel free to ask! I am sure other people might also find the same questions and answers helpful 😊 Regards, Bailey
-----Original Message----- From: Angelo Hongens <angelo@hongens.nl> Sent: April 29, 2023 11:21 PM To: Bailey Allison <ballison@45drives.com>; ceph-users@ceph.io Subject: [ceph-users] Re: architecture help (iscsi, rbd, backups?)
Bailey,
Thanks for your extensive reply, you got me down the wormhole of CephFS and SMB (and looking at a lot of 45drives videos and knowledge base, Houston dashboard, >reading up on CTDB, etc), and this is a really interesting option as well! Thanks for the write-up.
By the way, are you using the RBD driver in Windows in production with your customers?
The binaries are still called beta, and last time I tried it in a proof of concept setup (a while back), it would never connect and always crash out on me. After reporting >an issue, I did not get a response for almost three months before a dev responded that it was an unsupported ipv6 issue. Not a problem, and all very understandable, >it's open source software written mostly by volunteers, but I got a bit cautious about deploying this to production ;)
Angelo.
On 27/04/2023 18:20, Bailey Allison wrote: Hey Angelo,
Just to make sure I'm understanding correctly, the main idea for the use case is to be able to present Ceph storage to windows clients as SMB?
If so, you can absolutely use CephFS to get that done. This is something we do all the time with our cluster configurations, if we're looking to present ceph storage to windows clients for the use case of a file server is our standard choice, and to your point of security/ACLs we can make use of joining the samba server that to an existing active directory, and then assigning permissions through Windows.
I will provide a high level overview of an average setup to hopefully explain it better, and of course if you have any questions please let me know. I understand that this is way different of a setup of what you currently have planned, but it's a different choice that could prove useful in your case.
Essentially how it works is we have ceph cluster with CephFS configured, of which we map CephFS kernel mounts onto some gateway nodes, at which point we expose to clients via CTDB with SMB shares (CTDB for high availability).
i.e
ceph cluster > ceph fs > map cephfs kernel mount on linux client > create smb share on top of cephfs kernel mount > connect to samba share with windows clients.
The SMB gateway nodes hosting samba also can be joined to an Active Directory to allow setting Windows ACL permissions to allow more in depth control of ACLs.
Also I will say +1 for the RBD driver on Windows, something we also make use of a lot and have a lot of success with.
Again, please let me know if you need any insight or clarification, or have any further questions. Hope this is of assistance.
Regards,
Bailey
From: Angelo Höngens <angelo@hongens.nl> Sent: April 27, 2023 6:06 PM To: ceph-users@ceph.io Subject: [ceph-users] architecture help (iscsi, rbd, backups?)
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know
-----Original Message----- the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI
gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components
should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can
iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for
- focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). - I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as
research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each
consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI
to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are
any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an
iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows
file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an
image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff
going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts
on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email
to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io
_______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io
Hi Angelo, Just some thoughts to consider from our experience with similar setups: 1. Use Proxmox instead of VMWare, or anything KVM based. These VMs can consume Ceph directly, and provide the same level of service (some may say better) for live ,migration, hyperconvergence etc. Then you run Windows VMs in KVM, bring RBD storage to them as virtual disks and share out as needed. 2. Use NFS - all modern Windows OSs support it. You can use any NFS gateway you like, or set up your own machine or cluster (which is what we did with Storcium) and export your storage as needed. 3. If you must use VMWare, you can present datastores via NFS as well, this has a lot of indirection but is easier to manage. -- Alex Gorbachev ISS Storcium https://www.iss-integration.com On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 5:06 PM Angelo Höngens <angelo@hongens.nl> wrote:
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. - focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). - I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io
Thanks Alex, interesting perspectives. I already thought about proxmox as well, and that would also work quite nicely. I think that would be the most performant option to put VM's on RBD. But my entire goal was to run SMB servers on top of that hypervisor layer, to serve SMB shares to Windows. So I think Bailey's suggestion makes more sense, to use CephFS with Linux SMB gateways, which cuts out a layer in between, greatly improving performance. That also has the benefit of being able to use a single 1PB CephFS filesystem served by multiple SMB gateways instead of my initial plan of having like 10x100TB windows SMB file servers (I would not dare have a single 1PB windows VM with an NTFS disk) Angelo. On 27/04/2023 20:05, Alex Gorbachev wrote:
Hi Angelo,
Just some thoughts to consider from our experience with similar setups:
1. Use Proxmox instead of VMWare, or anything KVM based. These VMs can consume Ceph directly, and provide the same level of service (some may say better) for live ,migration, hyperconvergence etc. Then you run Windows VMs in KVM, bring RBD storage to them as virtual disks and share out as needed.
2. Use NFS - all modern Windows OSs support it. You can use any NFS gateway you like, or set up your own machine or cluster (which is what we did with Storcium) and export your storage as needed.
3. If you must use VMWare, you can present datastores via NFS as well, this has a lot of indirection but is easier to manage.
-- Alex Gorbachev ISS Storcium https://www.iss-integration.com <https://www.iss-integration.com>
On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 5:06 PM Angelo Höngens <angelo@hongens.nl <mailto:angelo@hongens.nl>> wrote:
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. - focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). - I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io <mailto:ceph-users@ceph.io> To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io <mailto:ceph-users-leave@ceph.io>
Hi Angelo, You can always use Samba to serve shares, it works well with AD, if that is needed. You may want to benchmark your prototypes in an as close to production setting as possible. -- Alex Gorbachev ISS Storcium iss-integration.com On Sat, Apr 29, 2023 at 10:58 PM Angelo Hongens <angelo@hongens.nl> wrote:
Thanks Alex, interesting perspectives.
I already thought about proxmox as well, and that would also work quite nicely. I think that would be the most performant option to put VM's on RBD.
But my entire goal was to run SMB servers on top of that hypervisor layer, to serve SMB shares to Windows.
So I think Bailey's suggestion makes more sense, to use CephFS with Linux SMB gateways, which cuts out a layer in between, greatly improving performance.
That also has the benefit of being able to use a single 1PB CephFS filesystem served by multiple SMB gateways instead of my initial plan of having like 10x100TB windows SMB file servers (I would not dare have a single 1PB windows VM with an NTFS disk)
Angelo.
Hi Angelo,
Just some thoughts to consider from our experience with similar setups:
1. Use Proxmox instead of VMWare, or anything KVM based. These VMs can consume Ceph directly, and provide the same level of service (some may say better) for live ,migration, hyperconvergence etc. Then you run Windows VMs in KVM, bring RBD storage to them as virtual disks and share out as needed.
2. Use NFS - all modern Windows OSs support it. You can use any NFS gateway you like, or set up your own machine or cluster (which is what we did with Storcium) and export your storage as needed.
3. If you must use VMWare, you can present datastores via NFS as well, this has a lot of indirection but is easier to manage.
-- Alex Gorbachev ISS Storcium https://www.iss-integration.com <https://www.iss-integration.com>
On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 5:06 PM Angelo Höngens <angelo@hongens.nl <mailto:angelo@hongens.nl>> wrote:
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing
On 27/04/2023 20:05, Alex Gorbachev wrote: the
data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean
that
iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next
5
years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. - focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are
most
important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is
also
written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). - I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and
support
for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other
real
linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've
been
testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single
DFS
namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is
that
the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s
write,
and 200MB/s read, which is pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS
than
block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io <mailto:ceph-users@ceph.io> To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io <mailto:ceph-users-leave@ceph.io>
Hello Angelo You can try PetaSAN www.petasan.org We support scale out iscsi with Ceph and is actively developed. /Maged On 27/04/2023 23:05, Angelo Höngens wrote:
Hey guys and girls,
I'm working on a project to build storage for one of our departments, and I want to ask you guys and girls for input on the high-level overview part. It's a long one, I hope you read along and comment.
SUMMARY
I made a plan last year to build a 'storage solution' including ceph and some windows VM's to expose the data over SMB to clients. A year later I finally have the hardware, built a ceph cluster, and I'm doing tests. Ceph itself runs great, but when I wanted to start exposing the data using iscsi to our VMware farm, I ran into some issues. I know the iscsi gateways will introduce some new performance bottlenecks, but I'm seeing really slow performance, still working on that.
But then I ran into the warning on the iscsi gateway page: "The iSCSI gateway is in maintenance as of November 2022. This means that it is no longer in active development and will not be updated to add new features.". Wait, what? Why!? What does this mean? Does this mean that iSCSI is now 'feature complete' and will still be supported the next 5 years, or will it be deprecated in the future? I tried searching, but couldn't find any info on the decision and the roadmap.
My goal is to build a future-proof setup, and using deprecated components should not be part of that of course.
If the iscsi gateway will still be supported the next few years and I can iron out the performance issues, I can still go on with my original plan. If not, I have to go back to the drawing board. And maybe you guys would advise me to take another route anyway.
GOALS
My goals/considerations are:
- we want >1PB of storage capacity for cheap (on a tight budget) for research data. Most of it is 'store once, read sometimes'. <1% of the data is 'hot'. - focus is on capacity, but it would be nice to have > 200MB/s of sequential write/read performance and not 'totally suck' on random i/o. Yes, not very well quantified, but ah. Sequential writes are most important. - end users all run Windows computers (mostly VDI's) and a lot of applications require SMB shares. - security is a big thing, we want really tight ACL's, specific monitoring agents, etc. - our data is incredibly important to us, we still want the 3-2-1 backup rule. Primary storage solution, a second storage solution in a different place, and some of the data that is not reproducible is also written to tape. We also want to be protected from ransomware or user errors (so no direct replication to the second storage). - I like open source, reliability, no fork-lift upgrades, no vendor lock-in, blah, well, I'm on the ceph list here, no need to convince you guys ;) - We're hiring a commercial company to do ceph maintenance and support for when I'm on leave or leaving the company, but they won't support clients, backup software, etc, so I want something as simple as possible. We do have multiple Windows/VMware admins, but no other real linux guru's.
THE INITIAL PLAN
Given these considerations, I ordered two identical clusters, each consisting of 3 monitor nodes and 8 osd nodes, Each osd node has 2 ssd's and 10 capacity disks (EC 4:2 for the data), and each node is connected using a 2x25Gbps bond. Ceph is running like a charm. Now I just have to think about exposing the data to end users, and I've been testing different setups.
My original plan was to expose for example 10x100TB rbd images using iSCSI to our VMware farm, formatting the luns with VMFS6, and run for example 2 Windows file servers per datastore on that with a single DFS namespace to end users. Then backup the file servers using our existing Veeam infrastructure to RGW running on the second cluster with an immutable bucket. This way we would have easily defined security boundaries: the clients can only reach the file servers, the file servers only see their local VMDK's, ESX only sees the luns on the iSCSI target, etc. When a file server would be compromised, it would have no access to ceph. We have easy incremental backups, immutability for ransomware protection, etc. And the best part is that the ceph admin can worry about ceph, the vmware admin can focus on ESX, VMFS and all the vmware stuff, and the Windows admins can focus on the Windows boxes, Windows-specific ACLS and tools and Veeam backups and stuff.
CURRENT SITUATION
I'm building out this plan now, but I'm running into issues with iSCSI. Are any of you doing something similar? What is your iscsi performance compared to direct rbd?
In regard to performance: If I take 2 test windows VM's, I put one on an iSCSI datastore and another with direct rbd access using the windows rbd driver, I create a share on those boxes and push data to it, I see different results (of course). Copying some iso images over SMB to the 'windows vm running direct rbd' I see around 800MB/s write, and 200MB/s read, which is pretty okay. When I send data to the 'windows vm running on top of iscsi' it starts writing at around 350MB/s, but after like 10-20 seconds drops to 100MB/s and won't go faster. Reads are anywhere from 40MB/s to 80MB/s, which is not really acceptable.
Another really viable and performant scenario would be to have the Windows file servers connect to rbd directly with the windows rbd driver. It seems to work well, it's fast, and you don't have the bottleneck that the iscsi gateway creates. But I see this driver is still in beta. Is anyone using this in production? What are your experiences? We would miss out on the separation of layers and thus have less security, but at the same time, it really increases efficiency and performance.
And if I use rbd, then vmware won't see the storage, and I cannot do an image backup using veeam. I could of course do backups of the rbd images, using tools like restic or backy to rgw running on the second cluster with immutable buckets. What are your experiences? Is it easy to do differential backups of lots of 50TB rbd images? Change rate is usually like 0.005% per day or something ;)
By the way, we also thought about CephFS, but we have some complex stuff going on with extended ACL's that I don't think will play nice with CephFS, and I think it's a lot more complex to backup CephFS than block images.
If you made it here, thank you for your time! I hope you can share thoughts on my questions!
Angelo. _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@ceph.io
participants (6)
-
Alex Gorbachev
-
Angelo Hongens
-
Angelo Höngens
-
Anthony D'Atri
-
Bailey Allison
-
Maged Mokhtar