Understanding and managing Object services

Use the following information to manage services that are related to IBM Storage Scale for Object storage.

You can use the mmces service command to enable, start, stop, or disable Object services on all protocol nodes.

The enable and disable operations are cluster-wide operations. To enable or disable the Object protocol, use mmces service [enable | disable] OBJ. The Object protocol must be initially configured by using the mmobj swift base command before it can be enabled in the cluster.

CAUTION:

Disabling the Object service unconfigures the object protocol and discards OpenStack Swift configuration and ring files from the CES cluster. If Openstack Keystone configuration is configured locally, disabling Object storage also discards the Keystone configuration and database files from the CES cluster. However, to avoid accidental data loss, the associated filesets that are used for the object data are not automatically removed during disable. The filesets for the object data and any filesets that are created for optional Object storage policies need to be removed manually. If you plan to re-enable the object protocol after you disable it, you must access the repository during the object disablement to reset to the original default object configuration. After, for enabling the object service, either different fileset names need to be specified or the existing filesets need to be cleaned up. For information on cleaning up the object filesets, see the steps "Remove the fileset that is created for object" and "Remove any fileset created for an object storage policy"(if applicable) in Cleanup procedures required if reinstalling with the installation toolkit.

Note: To disable the object protocol, first remove the object authentication. For complete usage information, see the mmuserauth command.

In addition, enabled Object service can be started and stopped on individual nodes or cluster-wide. To start or stop the object protocol cluster-wide, use the following command:

mmces service [start | stop] OBJ -a

To start or stop the object protocol on individual nodes, use the following command:

mmces service [start | stop] OBJ -N <node>

Attention: If Object services on a protocol node are stopped by the administrator manually, access to object data might be impacted unless the CES IP addresses are first moved to another node. You can accomplish this in multiple ways, but the simplest is to suspend the node. After you suspend a node, CES automatically moves the CES IPs to the remaining nodes in the cluster. However, doing this suspends operation for all protocols that are running on that protocol node.

If you want to stop object services on a protocol node, you can use the following steps:

Suspend CES operations on the protocol node by using the mmces node suspend command.
View the CES IP addresses on that node by using the mmces address list command and verify that all CES IP addresses are moved to other protocol nodes.
Stop the object services by using the mmces service stop OBJ command.

Note: All Object services must be controlled by using only the

mmces service
start/stop

and systemctl commands. The explicit use of system or Swift commands to manage services, like swift-init or systemctl, is not supported and might cause your system to operate incorrectly.

Performing these steps ensures that Object functionality is available on other nodes in the cluster.

To restore Object services on that protocol node, you can use the following steps:

Resume CES operations on the protocol node by using the mmces node resume command.
View the CES IP addresses on that node by using the mmces address list command and verify that all CES IP addresses are moved to that protocol node.
Start the Object services by using the mmces service start OBJ command.

Use the mces service list command to list the protocols enabled on IBM Storage Scale. List a verbose output of Object services that are running on the local node by using the -v flag as shown in the following example:

# mmces service list -v
Enabled services: OBJ SMB NFS
 OBJ is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-object-updater           is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-object-expirer           is running
    OBJ:ibmobjectizer                            is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-object-auditor           is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-object                   is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-account                  is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-container                is running
    OBJ:memcached                                is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-proxy                    is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-object-replicator        is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-account-reaper           is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-account-auditor          is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-container-auditor        is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-container-updater        is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-account-replicator       is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-container-replicator     is running
    OBJ:openstack-swift-object-sof               is running
    OBJ:postgresql-obj                           is running
    OBJ:httpd (keystone)                         is running
 SMB is running 
 NFS is running

For complete usage information, see mmces command.

Every Object protocol node can access every virtual device in the shared file system, and some OpenStack Swift object services can be optimized to take advantage of this by running from a single Object protocol node.

Even though objects are not replicated by OpenStack Swift, the swift-object-replicator runs to periodically clean up tombstone files from deleted objects. It is run on a single Object protocol node and manages cleanup for all of the virtual devices.

The swift-object-updater is responsible for updating container listings with objects that were not successfully added to the container when they were initially created, updated, or deleted. Like the object replicator, it is run on a single object protocol node.

The following table shows each of the Object services and the set of Object protocol nodes on which they need to be run.

Table 1. Object services and protocol nodes
Object service	GPFS protocol node
ibmobjectizer	`object_singleton_node` ¹
openstack-swift-account	All
openstack-swift-account-auditor	`object_singleton_node`
openstack-swift-account-reaper	All
openstack-swift-account-replicator	All
openstack-swift-container	All
openstack-swift-container-auditor	`object_singleton_node`
openstack-swift-container-updater	`object_singleton_node`
openstack-swift-container-replicator	All
openstack-swift-object	All
openstack-swift-object-auditor	`object_singleton_node` ²
openstack-swift-object-replicator	All
openstack-swift-object-sof	All ¹
openstack-swift-object-updater	`object_singleton_node`
openstack-swift-object-expirer	`object_singleton_node`
openstack-swift-proxy	All
memcached	All
httpd (RHEL) or apache2 (Ubuntu)	All ³
postgresql-obj	`object_database_node` ³
¹ If unified file and object access is enabled. ² If multi-region object deployment is enabled. ³ If local OpenStack Keystone Identity Service is configured.