Last Update: 2020-10-08

Table of Contents

Introduction
Major Updates
Ceph in a Windows World
Planned Releases
Download
Documentation
Release Notes
Known Issues
Report Issues
Mailing list
Bugzilla
Frequently Asked Questions
Beta Test Subscription and Registration Code
Private channel for sensitive data
Contact Beta Manager

 

Introduction

SUSE Enterprise Storage is an intelligent software-defined storage solution, powered by Ceph Technology. It enables enterprises to transform their traditional storage into a cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage infrastructure, capable of seamlessly adapting to changing business and data requirements.

SUSE Enterprise Storage Architecture

Major Updates

Containerization

Traditionally, SUSE Enterprise Storage delivered RPM packages for Ceph. In the new release, SES 7 will deliver the components as containers. SES 7 uses cephadm an up-stream framework which uses Podman container engine to perform orchestration. Kubernetes and a simple container engine (podman) will use the same containers.

Below are some benefits of containers:

• Improved upgrade/update story
• Isolated processes (better debugging/being able to deploy a single PTF container without touching other containers)
• Ability to add more day 2 operations to deployment framework
• Align with Kubernetes orchestration by re-using the same containers images
• Align with upstream community to harness community innovation.

Major Updates

• Two deployment options
  • Rook/Kubernetes
    • Co-location for compute and storage (Hyperconverged setup)
    • Self-healing, scaling of services
  • cephadm install stack
    • Simplification of Day 2 operations
    • Patch management with SUSE Manager
    • Simplification of future updates
• Ceph Dashboard: Disk handling
  • Simplification of OSDs (disks) management and replacement
• Native Windows Client Driver
  • Simplified storage deployment for Windows systems
  • Performance improvement

 

Ceph in a Windows World

We are bringing a new block driver (WNBD) and Ceph CLI tools to Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and 2019 platforms. These tools provide native connectivity to SUSE Enterprise Storage clusters version 6 and 7. This native I/O model may increase performance, and eliminate the complexities and single points of failure commonly associated with the iSCSI and Samba gateway configurations.

Ceph is a highly-resilient software-defined-storage offering, which has only been available to Microsoft Windows environments through the use of iSCSI or CIFS gateways. This gateway architecture introduces a single point of contact and limits fault-tolerance and bandwidth, in comparison to the native I/O paths of Ceph with RADOS.

In order to bring the benefits of native Ceph to Microsoft Windows environments, SUSE partnered with Cloudbase Solutions to port Ceph to the Microsoft Windows platform. This work is nearing completion, and provides the following functionality:

• RADOS Block Device (RBD)
• CephFS

This second beta of the SUSE Enterprise Storage Driver for Windows changes the device model from a strictly Network Block Device model, to an IOCTL based model which offers the following features:

• Significantly increased performance
• Improved stability
• Extensibility through upper and lower level APIs

These improvements include a new libwnbd.dll, and changes to some command line tools. The most significant is a renaming of ‘rbd-nbd.exe’ to ‘rbd-wnbd.exe’. Corresponding registry entries have also been renamed to include ‘wnbd’.

Please check out our Ceph Windows Guide documentation, to learn how to install and beta test it!

And download our Ceph CLI tools and driver from here.

Planned Releases

• Milestone 12 – June 17, 2020
• Milestone 13 – July 01, 2020
• Milestone 14 – July 22, 2020
• Milestone 15 – August 12, 2020
• Milestone 16 – September 02, 2020
• Milestone 17 – September 16, 2020
• Milestone 18 (GMC1) – September 30, 2020
• Milestone 19 (GMC2) – October 07, 2020
• FCS – Mid October, 2020

 

Download

• SLES 15 SP2:
  • https://www.suse.com/download/sles/
  • SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 Milestone 19 add-ons:
  • https://beta.suse.com/private/SLE15/SP2/download/SES7/

Documentation

• Complete SUSE documentations (https://susedoc.github.io/):
  • Administration Guide
  • Deployment Guide
  • Security Hardening Guide
  • Troubleshooting Guide
  • Tuning Guide
  • Ceph for Windows Guide

Release Notes

• https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-Enterprise-Storage/7/
• https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP2

Known Issues

• • Component/Issue/Bug or Jira Number

 

Dashboard	Translations to languages other than English incomplete	BSC#1172673
Dashboard	URLs in notifications point to the upstream documentation	BSC#1175120
Dashboard	Scrollbar on crush map viewer behaving oddly	BSC#1170200
Dashboard	Heart icon not visible, when dashboard menu selected	BSC#1175169
Dashboard	Creating EC pools using the “Clay” plugin is not possible	SES-2183 – Dashboard: add “clay” EC plugin Under Review
Dashboard	Telemetry can’t be configured	BSC#1176453
Dashboard	Dashboard is unable to manage NFS Ganesha instances deployed by cephadm and Rook	BSC#1177344
Dashboard	NFS page: error in mkdirs /share: Permission denied [Errno 13]	BSC#1177174
Dashboard + CLI	Blinking enclosure LEDs using lsmcli or via the Dashboard doesn’t work, as the command aborts with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'lsm._clib'	BSC#1176448
NFS Ganesha	Containerized NFS Ganesha daemons don’t support NFSv3	BSC#1177091
cephadm	upgrade to SES 7 still in progress	SES-769 – Upgrade from SES6 (DeepSea) to SES7 (cephadm) In Progress
cephadm	improve UX when updating the cluster to a minor release	SES-2022 – cephadm: improve UX when updating the cluster to a minor release In Progress
cephadm	Deploying the SNMP trap receiver is not implemented yet	SES-1194 – cephadm: Configure SNMP Traps Closed
cephadm	OSDs are not properly mapped to their OSDSpecs (counting in `orch ls` is wrong)	https://github.com/ceph/ceph/pull/36541
cephadm	ceph orch osd rm – Unable to find OSDs	BSC#1175145
cephadm	nfs-rgw	SES-2095 – cephadm: nfs-rgw Backlog
cephadm	missing man pages	SES-2108 – SES 7 (cephadm): Missing man pages In Progress
cephadm+rook	missing container images for monitoring stack	SES-2008 – Container Images for prometheus, node-exporter, alertmanager Closed
ceph-volume	batch sub-command is inconsistent, not idempotent and thus makes replacing OSDs very awkward. Also: doesn’t allow for testing in teuthology creates multi device VGs in some scenarios doesn’t allow to pre-provision wal/db disks probably other issues I forget	SES-1071 – refactor osd creation code path In Progress
cephfs scheduled snapshots	PR is still open waiting for review	https://github.com/ceph/ceph/pull/29489 SES-704 – CephFS scheduled snapshots Closed
Rook drive group deployment	ceph-volume feature backported to octopus slightly after the M15 cutoff. This should be in for M16	https://github.com/ceph/ceph/pull/35728 https://github.com/ceph/ceph/pull/36558
Monitoring	The Grafana plugin “vonage-status-panel” no longer works with Grafana 6.7 and newer, which breaks the Ceph cluster status indicators on the “Ceph Cluster” Grafana dashboard (which is not embedded into Ceph Dashboard)	BSC#1173810
Monitoring	Downstream container image (CaaSP v5) for alertmanager is not compatible with upstream image and can currently not be used as drop-in replacement.	BSC#1174902
iSCSI	SCSI reservations currently not supported
rook	When adding an additional data pool to an already-created CephFilesystem, Rook will create the pool but not add it to the filesystem. Not critical; workaround exists (add pool to filesystem automatically)	SES-2049 – Rook doesn’t add pools to already-created filesystems Planning
rook	Rook v1.4 has a breaking change that should be considered before upgrading. Make sure the lvm2 package is installed on the host where OSDs are running. If not, the prepare job will fail and the upgrade of OSDs will be blocked. This only applies to non-PVC OSDs. Beginning in v1.3, OSDs created on PVCs no longer rely on LVM.	SES-2130 – doc update for the lvm package on the host Closed
iSCSI	Unable to export images because tcmu-runner-handler-rbd package is not installed on SUSE ceph image. EDIT: the package only doesn’t exist on the OBS side, our internal image (devel/storage/7.0) does contain the package. Workaround: Install tcmu-runner-handler-rbd package manually	https://tracker.ceph.com/issues/46910
iSCSI	Unable to export images using “krbd” backstore	BSC#1175808
iSCSI	Initiator errors when connected to an iSCSI target using “krbd” backstore	BSC#1177109

Fixed:

Component	Issue	Reference
Rook Installation	There is no need to install rook-k8s-yaml RPM package from beta.suse.com anymore. This package is now available in the Media.
ceph-salt	Orchestrated shutdown of the whole cluster not supported	SES-2048 – ceph-salt: Need an orchestrated shutdown of the whole cluster Closed
ceph-salt	Running ceph-salt update fails with an error: /etc/sudoers.d/ceph-salt: file not found Workaround: Install package sudo on all nodes, e.g. via salt '<nodes>' pkg.install sudo	[storage-beta] /etc/sudoers.d/ceph-salt: file not found BSC#1176328

REPORT ISSUES

For reporting bugs and questions please use our email list first. If the reported issue has not been resolved, please open a bug report. .

Mailing List

storage-beta@lists.suse.com is our Mailing List dedicated to SUSE Enterprise Storage Beta product discussions. It is used by the SUSE Release Team to announce new beta images and technical information, as well as for general or technical questions, feedback, or defect reports related to SUSE Enterprise Storage Beta products from our beta testers base.

Please note that only subscribers can post to our mailing lists. To subscribe, please go to http://lists.suse.com/mailman/listinfo/storage-beta.

To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the storage-beta Archives.

Please refer to our Mailing Lists Guideline for more information.

Bugzilla

Here are the links to the SUSE Enterprise Storage Bugzilla product that you will use for reporting the defects of the following products:

• Create a new bug for Beta SUSE Enterprise Storage 7
  

If you don’t have a Bugzilla account, you can create a new account.

Please refer to our complete Bugzilla guideline for more information and before creating your first bug report: how to use Bugzilla

 

Frequently Asked Questions

– Beta Test Subscription and Registration Code

Thus we will not provide a beta product subscription or beta product registration code by default for the SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 Beta Program. You should request one via beta-programs@lists.suse.com, but we reserve the right to review your case and eventually provide one for your personal beta test.

Without a beta registration code for SUSE Enterprise Storage 7 you won’t be able to access the online channels.

– Private channel for sensitive data

In case you are a SUSE partner or customer and would like to share some sensitive data with us (data for bug reports, feedbacks, etc), please contact us at beta-programs@lists.suse.com, and we will review your case and provide you a private channel with us.

– Contact Beta Manager

For questions related to the beta test infrastructure, for example download issues or problems with reporting bugs or the mailing list, please write to beta-programs@lists.suse.com