Configuring Cinder with the Ceph RADOS block device backend driver

Ceph is an open source, software-defined storage system that runs on commodity x86 hardware. Ceph provides block storage volumes that can be attached as virtual disks. Ceph utilizes multiple hosts' local disks to create a unified virtual disk pool. Ceph can scale massively to petabyte storage pools and takes care of disk replication, rebalancing, and other storage maintenance operations.

Cinder implements an rbd (RADOS block devices) backend storage driver that can utilize the existing Ceph storage pool, manage volumes, and attach volumes to VM instances.

Getting ready

Before getting started with configuring a Ceph rbd backend driver, make sure to install Ceph client packages and the Python rbd binding library on all OpenStack nodes, including controller and compute nodes:

[root@controller ~]# yum install -y python-rbd ceph
[root@compute1 ~]# yum install -y python-rbd ceph

We will need to prepare a storage pool named cinder...