An environment for Ceph training sessions using Vagrant

Purpose

This repository allows you to spin up a Ceph training environment in minutes. It deploys a total of 5 nodes using any distribution for which supported packages are available from http://ceph.com, and pre-installs the ceph and ceph-deploy packages. From there, you can go ahead and deploy a virtualized Ceph mini-cluster.

Software requirements

You'll obviously need Vagrant. Since the Vagrant environment uses Ansible for provisioning, you'll need that too. And then there are a few extra requirements in terms of Vagrant plugins.

• vagrant-hosts is required so the nodes can resolve each others' host names.
• If you want to deploy on libvirt/KVM (recommended if your host runs Linux), you'll need vagrant-libvirt version 0.0.19 or higher.
• Since most Vagrant boxes are provided for the default virtualbox provider, to convert them to a format suitable for libvirt/KVM you'll also need vagrant-mutate.

Network requirements

The configuration assigns IP addresses in the IPv4 networks 192.168.122.0/24, 192.168.133.0/24 and 192.168.144.0/24. If those networks do not yet exist in your Libvirt configuration, you will need to define them. Configuration files for these networks are given in the libvirt directory; you will need to define and then start the networks with virsh:

virsh net-define libvirt/cluster.xml
virsh net-start cluster

Configuration

You will need to provide a settings.yml file to tweak your configuration. An example with sane defaults is provided as settings.yml.example.

---
ram: 1024

ceph_release: firefly

box: centos-6.5

box_url:  "https://vagrantcloud.com/chef/centos-6.5/version/1/provider/virtualbox.box"

• ram sets the amount of virtual RAM to allocate to each of the 5 nodes.

• ceph_release should be the codename of any supported Ceph release for which ceph.com hosts binary packages.

• box is the name of the box you want to deploy. Check with vagrant box list to see which boxes are currently available on your system.

• box_url is a publicly available URL from whence to download your box, if it hasn't already been downloaded.

Converting boxes for your provider

Most published boxes are only available for the default virtualbox provider. However, with the vagrant-mutate plugin installed, converting such a box to one that Libvirt/KVM can use is easy. Suppose you want to grab the centos-6.5 box and make it available to Libvirt:

vagrant box add centos-6.5 "https://vagrantcloud.com/chef/centos-6.5/version/1/provider/virtualbox.box"
vagrant mutate centos-6.5 libvirt

Firing up the environment

Once you have adjusted settings.yml to your liking, create and provision your boxes with

• vagrant up

or

• vagrant up --provider=libvirt

If you only want to bring up a single box or a few, you can do so with

• vagrant up [--provider=libvirt] {alice|bob|charlie|daisy|eric|frank}

Parallel provisioning

Normally, Vagrant provisions hosts in sequence. In contrast, to take advantage of parallelism using the Ansible provisioner, this Vagrantfile uses alice as the provisioning node, using the pattern explained here.

Thus, if you just issue

vagrant up [--provider=libvirt]

Then alice is spun up last and subsequently takes care of provisioning in parallel. If, however, you deploy individual nodes, you'll have to reprovision from alice to make sure they are configured correctly, like so:

1. vagrant up [--provider=libvirt] alice
2. vagrant up [--provider=libvirt] bob
3. vagrant up [--provider=libvirt] frank
4. vagrant provision alice