Operations

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Learn to do operational tasks for IBM Storage Ceph.

Introduction to the Ceph Orchestrator
IBM Storage Ceph Orchestrators are manager modules that primarily act as a bridge between an IBM Storage Ceph cluster and deployment tools like Rook and Cephadm for a unified experience. They also integrate with the Ceph command line interface and Ceph Dashboard.
Managing services
As a storage administrator, after installing the IBM Storage Ceph cluster, you can monitor and manage the services in a storage cluster. A service is a group of daemons that are configured together.
Managing hosts
As a storage administrator, you can use the Ceph Orchestrator with Cephadm in the backend to add, list, and remove hosts in an existing IBM Storage Ceph cluster.
Managing monitors
As a storage administrator, you can deploy additional monitors using placement specification, add monitors using service specification, add monitors to a subnet configuration, and add monitors to specific hosts. Apart from this, you can remove the monitors.
Managing manager daemons
As a storage administrator, you can use the Ceph Orchestrator to deploy additional manager daemons. Cephadm automatically installs a manager daemon on the bootstrap node during the bootstrapping process.
Managing OSDs
As a storage administrator, you can use the Ceph Orchestrators to manage IBM Storage Ceph OSDs.
Managing the monitoring stack
As a storage administrator, you can use the Ceph Orchestrator with Cephadm in the backend to deploy monitoring and alerting stack. The monitoring stack consists of Prometheus, Prometheus exporters, Prometheus Alertmanager, and Grafana. Users need to either define these services with Cephadm in a YAML configuration file, or they can use the command line interface to deploy them. When multiple services of the same type are deployed, a highly-available setup is deployed. The node exporter is an exception to this rule.
Basic client setup
As a storage administrator, you have to set up IBM Storage Ceph client machines with basic configuration to interact with the storage cluster.
Managing the MDS service
As a storage administrator, you can use Ceph Orchestrator with Cephadm in the backend to deploy the MDS service. By default, a Ceph File System (CephFS) uses only one active MDS daemon. However, systems with many clients benefit from multiple active MDS daemons.
Managing the Ceph Object Gateway
As a storage administrator, you can deploy Ceph Object Gateway using the command line interface or by using the service specification.
Managing the NFS-Ganesha gateway using the Ceph orchestrator
As a storage administrator, you can use the Orchestrator with Cephadm in the backend to deploy the NFS-Ganesha gateway. Cephadm deploys NFS Ganesha using a predefined RADOS pool and optional namespace.
Handling a node failure
As a storage administrator, you can experience a whole node failing within the storage cluster, and handling a node failure is similar to handling a disk failure. With a node failure, instead of Ceph recovering placement groups (PGs) for only one disk, all PGs on the disks within that node must be recovered. Ceph will detect that the OSDs are all down and automatically start the recovery process, known as self-healing.
Configuring SNMP traps
As a storage administrator, you can deploy and configure the simple network management protocol (SNMP) gateway in an IBM Storage Ceph cluster to receive alerts from the Prometheus Alertmanager and route them as SNMP traps to the cluster.
Handling a data center failure
As a storage administrator, you can take preventive measures to avoid a data center failure.

Parent topic: Administering