Notice

This document is for a development version of Ceph.

Developing with cephadm

There are several ways to develop with cephadm. Which you use depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

vstart --cephadm

  • Start a cluster with vstart, with cephadm configured

  • Manage any additional daemons with cephadm

  • Requires compiled ceph binaries

In this case, the mon and manager at a minimum are running in the usual vstart way, not managed by cephadm. But cephadm is enabled and the local host is added, so you can deploy additional daemons or add additional hosts.

This works well for developing cephadm itself, because any mgr/cephadm or cephadm/cephadm code changes can be applied by kicking ceph-mgr with ceph mgr fail x. (When the mgr (re)starts, it loads the cephadm/cephadm script into memory.)

MON=1 MGR=1 OSD=0 MDS=0 ../src/vstart.sh -d -n -x --cephadm

  • ~/.ssh/id_dsa[.pub] is used as the cluster key. It is assumed that this key is authorized to ssh with no passphrase to root@`hostname`.

  • cephadm does not try to manage any daemons started by vstart.sh (any nonzero number in the environment variables). No service spec is defined for mon or mgr.

  • You’ll see health warnings from cephadm about stray daemons--that’s because the vstart-launched daemons aren’t controlled by cephadm.

  • The default image is quay.io/ceph-ci/ceph:main, but you can change this by passing -o container_image=... or ceph config set global container_image ....

cstart and cpatch

The cstart.sh script will launch a cluster using cephadm and put the conf and keyring in your build dir, so that the bin/ceph ... CLI works (just like with vstart). The ckill.sh script will tear it down.

  • A unique but stable fsid is stored in fsid (in the build dir).

  • The mon port is random, just like with vstart.

  • The container image is quay.io/ceph-ci/ceph:$tag where $tag is the first 8 chars of the fsid.

  • If the container image doesn’t exist yet when you run cstart for the first time, it is built with cpatch.

There are a few advantages here:

  • The cluster is a “normal” cephadm cluster that looks and behaves just like a user’s cluster would. In contrast, vstart and teuthology clusters tend to be special in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways (e.g. having the lockdep turned on).

To start a test cluster:

sudo ../src/cstart.sh

The last line of the output will be a line you can cut+paste to update the container image. For instance:

sudo ../src/script/cpatch -t quay.io/ceph-ci/ceph:8f509f4e

By default, cpatch will patch everything it can think of from the local build dir into the container image. If you are working on a specific part of the system, though, can you get away with smaller changes so that cpatch runs faster. For instance:

sudo ../src/script/cpatch -t quay.io/ceph-ci/ceph:8f509f4e --py

will update the mgr modules (minus the dashboard). Or:

sudo ../src/script/cpatch -t quay.io/ceph-ci/ceph:8f509f4e --core

will do most binaries and libraries. Pass -h to cpatch for all options.

Once the container is updated, you can refresh/restart daemons by bouncing them with:

sudo systemctl restart ceph-`cat fsid`.target

When you’re done, you can tear down the cluster with:

sudo ../src/ckill.sh   # or,
sudo ../src/cephadm/cephadm rm-cluster --force --fsid `cat fsid`

cephadm bootstrap --shared_ceph_folder

Cephadm can also be used directly without compiled ceph binaries.

Run cephadm like so:

sudo ./cephadm bootstrap --mon-ip 127.0.0.1 \
  --ssh-private-key /home/<user>/.ssh/id_rsa \
  --skip-mon-network \
  --skip-monitoring-stack --single-host-defaults \
  --skip-dashboard \
  --shared_ceph_folder /home/<user>/path/to/ceph/

  • ~/.ssh/id_rsa is used as the cluster key. It is assumed that this key is authorized to ssh with no passphrase to root@`hostname`.

Source code changes made in the pybind/mgr/ directory then require a daemon restart to take effect.

Kcli: a virtualization management tool to make easy orchestrators development

Kcli is meant to interact with existing virtualization providers (libvirt, KubeVirt, oVirt, OpenStack, VMware vSphere, GCP and AWS) and to easily deploy and customize VMs from cloud images.

It allows you to setup an environment with several vms with your preferred configuration (memory, cpus, disks) and OS flavor.

main advantages:

  • Fast. Typically you can have a completely new Ceph cluster ready to debug and develop orchestrator features in less than 5 minutes.

  • “Close to production” lab. The resulting lab is close to “real” clusters in QE labs or even production. It makes it easy to test “real things” in an almost “real” environment.

  • Safe and isolated. Does not depend of the things you have installed in your machine. And the vms are isolated from your environment.

  • Easy to work “dev” environment. For “not compiled” software pieces, for example any mgr module. It is an environment that allow you to test your changes interactively.

Installation:

Complete documentation in kcli installation but we suggest to use the container image approach.

So things to do:

  • 1. Review requirements and install/configure whatever is needed to meet them.

  • 2. get the kcli image and create one alias for executing the kcli command

    # podman pull quay.io/karmab/kcli
# alias kcli='podman run --net host -it --rm --security-opt label=disable -v $HOME/.ssh:/root/.ssh -v $HOME/.kcli:/root/.kcli -v /var/lib/libvirt/images:/var/lib/libvirt/images -v /var/run/libvirt:/var/run/libvirt -v $PWD:/workdir -v /var/tmp:/ignitiondir quay.io/karmab/kcli'

Note

This assumes that /var/lib/libvirt/images is your default libvirt pool…. Adjust if using a different path

Note

Once you have used your kcli tool to create and use different labs, we suggest you stick to a given container tag and update your kcli alias. Why? kcli uses a rolling release model and sticking to a specific container tag will improve overall stability. what we want is overall stability.

Test your kcli installation:

See the kcli basic usage workflow

Create a Ceph lab cluster

In order to make this task simple, we are going to use a “plan”.

A “plan” is a file where you can define a set of vms with different settings. You can define hardware parameters (cpu, memory, disks ..), operating system and it also allows you to automate the installation and configuration of any software you want to have.

There is a repository with a collection of plans that can be used for different purposes. And we have predefined plans to install Ceph clusters using Ceph ansible or cephadm, so let’s create our first Ceph cluster using cephadm:

# kcli create plan -u https://github.com/karmab/kcli-plans/blob/master/ceph/ceph_cluster.yml

This will create a set of three vms using the plan file pointed by the url. After a few minutes, let’s check the cluster:

  • Take a look to the vms created:

    # kcli list vms

  • Enter in the bootstrap node:

    # kcli ssh ceph-node-00

  • Take a look to the ceph cluster installed:

    [centos@ceph-node-00 ~]$ sudo -i
[root@ceph-node-00 ~]# cephadm version
[root@ceph-node-00 ~]# cephadm shell
[ceph: root@ceph-node-00 /]# ceph orch host ls

Create a Ceph cluster to make easy developing in mgr modules (Orchestrators and Dashboard)

The cephadm kcli plan (and cephadm) are prepared to do that.

The idea behind this method is to replace several python mgr folders in each of the ceph daemons with the source code folders in your host machine. This “trick” will allow you to make changes in any orchestrator or dashboard module and test them intermediately. (only needed to disable/enable the mgr module)

So in order to create a ceph cluster for development purposes you must use the same cephadm plan but with a new parameter pointing to your Ceph source code folder:

# kcli create plan -u https://github.com/karmab/kcli-plans/blob/master/ceph/ceph_cluster.yml -P ceph_dev_folder=/home/mycodefolder/ceph

Ceph Dashboard development

Ceph dashboard module is not going to be loaded if previously you have not generated the frontend bundle.

For now, in order load properly the Ceph Dashboardmodule and to apply frontend changes you have to run “ng build” on your laptop:

# Start local frontend build with watcher (in background):
sudo dnf install -y nodejs
cd <path-to-your-ceph-repo>
cd src/pybind/mgr/dashboard/frontend
sudo chown -R <your-user>:root dist node_modules
NG_CLI_ANALYTICS=false npm ci
npm run build -- --deleteOutputPath=false --watch &

After saving your changes, the frontend bundle will be built again. When completed, you’ll see:

"Localized bundle generation complete."

Then you can reload your Dashboard browser tab.

Cephadm box container (Podman inside Podman) development environment

As kcli has a long startup time, we created an alternative which is faster using Podman inside Podman. This approach has its downsides too as we have to simulate the creation of osds and addition of devices with loopback devices.

Cephadm’s box environment is simple to set up. The setup requires you to get the required Podman images for Ceph and what we call boxes. A box is the first layer of Podman containers which can be either a seed or a host. A seed is the main box which holds Cephadm and where you bootstrap the cluster. On the other hand, you have hosts with a SSH server setup so you can add those hosts to the cluster. The second layer, managed by Cephadm, inside the seed box, requires the Ceph image.

Warning

This development environment is still experimental and can have unexpected behaviour. Please take a look at the road map and the known issues section to see what the development progress.

Requirements

Setup

In order to setup Cephadm’s box run:

cd src/cephadm/box
./box.py -v cluster setup

Note

It is recommended to run box with verbose (-v) as it will show the output of shell commands being run.

After getting all needed images we can create a simple cluster without OSDs and hosts with:

./box.py -v cluster start
If you want to deploy the cluster with more OSDs and hosts::

# 3 osds and 3 hosts by default sudo box -v cluster start --extended # explicitly change number of hosts and osds sudo box -v cluster start --extended --osds 5 --hosts 5

Warning

OSDs are still not supported in the box implementation with Podman. It is work in progress.

Without the extended option, explicitly adding either more hosts or OSDs won’t change the state of the cluster.

Note

Cluster start will try to setup even if cluster setup was not called.

Note

OSDs are created with loopback devices and hence, sudo is needed to create loopback devices capable of holding OSDs.

Note

Each osd will require 5GiB of space.

After bootstrapping the cluster you can go inside the seed box in which you’ll be able to run Cephadm commands:

./box.py -v cluster bash
[root@8d52a7860245] cephadm --help
[root@8d52a7860245] cephadm shell
...

If you want to navigate to the dashboard enter https://localhost:8443 on you browser.

You can also find the hostname and ip of each box container with:

./box.py cluster list

and you’ll see something like:

IP               Name            Hostname
172.30.0.2       box_hosts_1     6283b7b51d91
172.30.0.3       box_hosts_3     3dcf7f1b25a4
172.30.0.4       box_seed_1      8d52a7860245
172.30.0.5       box_hosts_2     c3c7b3273bf1

To remove the cluster and clean up run:

./box.py cluster down

If you just want to clean up the last cluster created run:

./box.py cluster cleanup

To check all available commands run:

./box.py --help

If you want to run the box with Docker you can. You’ll have to specify which engine you want to you like:

./box.py -v --engine docker cluster list

With Docker commands like bootstrap and osd creation should be called with sudo since it requires privileges to create osds on VGs and LVs:

sudo ./box.py -v --engine docker cluster start --expanded

Warning

Using Docker as the box engine is dangerous as there were some instances where the Xorg session was killed.

Known issues

  • If you get permission issues with Cephadm because it cannot infer the keyring and configuration, please run cephadm like this example:

    cephadm shell --config /etc/ceph/ceph.conf --keyring /etc/ceph/ceph.kerying

  • Docker containers run with the --privileged flag enabled which has been seen to make some computers log out.

  • If SELinux is not disabled you’ll probably see unexpected behaviour. For example: if not all permissions of Ceph repo files are set to your user it will probably fail starting with podman-compose.

  • If running a command it fails to run a podman command because it couldn’t find the container, you can debug by running the same podman-compose .. up command displayed with the flag -v.

Road map

  • Create osds with ceph-volume raw.

  • Enable ceph-volume to mark loopback devices as a valid block device in the inventory.

  • Make the box ready to run dashboard CI tests (including cluster expansion).

Note regarding network calls from CLI handlers

Executing any cephadm CLI commands like ceph orch ls will block the mon command handler thread within the MGR, thus preventing any concurrent CLI calls. Note that pressing ^C will not resolve this situation, as only the client will be aborted, but not execution of the command within the orchestrator manager module itself. This means, cephadm will be completely unresponsive until the execution of the CLI handler is fully completed. Note that even ceph orch ps will not respond while another handler is executing.

This means we should do very few synchronous calls to remote hosts. As a guideline, cephadm should do at most O(1) network calls in CLI handlers. Everything else should be done asynchronously in other threads, like serve().

Note regarding different variables used in the code

  • a service_type is something like mon, mgr, alertmanager etc defined in ServiceSpec

  • a service_id is the name of the service. Some services don’t have names.

  • a service_name is <service_type>.<service_id>

  • a daemon_type is the same as the service_type, except for ingress, which has the haproxy and keepalived daemon types.

  • a daemon_id is typically <service_id>.<hostname>.<random-string>. (Not the case for e.g. OSDs. OSDs are always called OSD.N)

  • a daemon_name is <daemon_type>.<daemon_id>

Compiling cephadm

Recent versions of cephadm are based on Python Zip Application support, and are “compiled” from Python source code files in the ceph tree. To create your own copy of the cephadm “binary” use the script located at src/cephadm/build.py in the Ceph tree. The command should take the form ./src/cephadm/build.py [output].

You can pass a limited set of version metadata values to be stored in the compiled cepadm. These options can be passed to the build script with the --set-version-var or -S option. The values should take the form KEY=VALUE and valid keys include: * CEPH_GIT_VER * CEPH_GIT_NICE_VER * CEPH_RELEASE * CEPH_RELEASE_NAME * CEPH_RELEASE_TYPE

Example: ./src/cephadm/build.py -SCEPH_GIT_VER=$(git rev-parse HEAD) -SCEPH_GIT_NICE_VER=$(git describe) /tmp/cephadm

Typically these values will be passed to build.py by other, higher level, build tools - such as cmake.

The compiled version of the binary may include a curated set of dependencies within the zipapp. The tool used to fetch the bundled dependencies can be Python’s pip, locally installed RPMs, or bundled dependencies can be disabled. To select the mode for bundled dependencies use the --bundled-dependencies or -B option with a value of pip, rpm, or none.

The compiled cephadm zipapp file retains metadata about how it was built. This can be displayed by running cephadm version --verbose. The command will emit a JSON formatted object showing version metadata (if available), a list of the bundled dependencies generated by the build script (if bundled dependencies were enabled), and a summary of the top-level contents of the zipapp. Example:

$ ./cephadm version --verbose
{
  "name": "cephadm",
  "ceph_git_nice_ver": "18.0.0-6867-g6a1df2d0b01",
  "ceph_git_ver": "6a1df2d0b01da581bfef3357940e1e88d5ce70ce",
  "ceph_release_name": "reef",
  "ceph_release_type": "dev",
  "bundled_packages": [
    {
      "name": "Jinja2",
      "version": "3.1.2",
      "package_source": "pip",
      "requirements_entry": "Jinja2 == 3.1.2"
    },
    {
      "name": "MarkupSafe",
      "version": "2.1.3",
      "package_source": "pip",
      "requirements_entry": "MarkupSafe == 2.1.3"
    }
  ],
  "zip_root_entries": [
    "Jinja2-3.1.2-py3.9.egg-info",
    "MarkupSafe-2.1.3-py3.9.egg-info",
    "__main__.py",
    "__main__.pyc",
    "_cephadmmeta",
    "cephadmlib",
    "jinja2",
    "markupsafe"
  ]
}

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