Since you are chatting about ceph-deploy tomorrow, I'll chime in with a bit more. I'm interested in ceph-deploy since it can be a light-weight production appropriate installer. The docs repeatedly warn that mkcephfs is not intended for production clusters, and Neil reminds us that the expectation is that production clusters will likely use a config management tool. Seems like that is most likely Chef, but I know there are others. I've always wondered "why" mkcephfs isn't suitable. Looking at the Chef recipes and ceph-deploy, my best explanation is that these other tools use ceph-disk-prepare to take advantage of GPT and to label the disks for Ceph's use. Then you can use the Upstart scripts to auto recognize prepared disks and automatically add them to the cluster. This scales a lot better than having to add each disk (assigned to a node) in ceph.conf and using /etc/init.d/ceph to stop/start the cluster. It also makes it quite a lot easier to add new OSDs to the cluster. Is that about right? If that's on the right track, I'm interested in ceph-deploy to achieve these goals because at the moment we're not interested in deploying Chef (or Puppet), great tools that they are. Down the road, sure, but only once we have some in-house experience/expertise, which we currently do not. Having a standalone tool that is just "simple" Python seems like a nice alternative. Those are my thoughts! - Travis On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 7:09 PM, Neil Levine <neil.levine@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > We're having a chat about ceph-deploy tomorrow. We need to strike a > balance between its being a useful tool for standing up a quick > cluster and its ignoring the UNIX philosophy and trying to do to much. > > My assumption is that for most production operations, or at the point > where people decide to invest in Ceph, users will already have > selected a parallel execution and/or configuration management tool. > Ensuring new or early PoC adopters, who perhaps don't want to wade > into the wider-operational frameworks issues, is probably where the > tool is best focused. > > Neil > > On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Travis Rhoden <trhoden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 6:14 PM, Sage Weil <sage@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> On Tue, 22 Jan 2013, Neil Levine wrote: >>>> Out of interest, would people prefer that the Ceph deployment script >>>> didn't try to handle server-server file copy and just did the local >>>> setup only, or is it useful that it tries to be a mini-config >>>> management tool at the same time? >>> >>> BTW, you can also run mkcephfs that way; the man page will let you run >>> individual steps and do the remote execution parts yourself. >>> >>> But I'm also curious what people think of the 'normal' usage... anyone? >>> >>> sage >>> >> >> While I am interested to see where ceph-deploy goes, I do think >> mkcephfs in its current form is quite useful. It does allow you to >> stand up decent size clusters with relative ease and is fairly fast. >> It has also come quite a ways since since the pre-argonaut form -- the >> recent --mkfs additions coupled with the auto-mounting in >> /etc/init.d/ceph is pretty slick. It was a nice discovery for me last >> week, as I hadn't created a cluster from scratch since 0.50 or so. >> >> - Travis -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe ceph-devel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html