Read the article to find out the steps to access Ceph via NFS. At Bobcares, with our Server Management Services, we can handle your server-related issues.

How to access Ceph via NFS?

With its 3-in-1 interfaces for object, block, and file-level storage, Ceph is a storage platform that implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster. It is open-source software. We can set up the Ceph to allow file-based access when integrated with the NFS-Ganesha NFS server.

Let’s look into the steps to access Ceph via NFS.

Set up NFS Server

The File System Abstraction Layer (FSAL) feature of NFS supports plugins of various storage backends. For CephFS, the FSAL plugin is FSAL_CEPH. For an NFS server export, this plugin uses libcephfs  client to mount the exporting CephFS path. Establishing NFS-Ganesha with CephFS includes setting the configuration files for both NFS-Ganesha and Ceph as well as the CephX access credentials needed by the Ceph clients that NFS-Ganesha creates to access CephFS.

NFS-Ganesha setup: Ganesha caching is minimized if possible as libcephfs clients (of FSAL CEPH) likewise aggressively cache. The NFS-Ganesha setup allows reading from Ganesha config files stored in RADOS objects. Additionally, the setup enables the storage of client recovery data in the RADOS OMAP key-value interface. It also requires access to NFSv4.1+. This setup has also the option to enable read delegations.

libcephfs clients setup: In order to allow clients to connect to the Ceph cluster’s monitors, libcephfs clients ceph.conf file has a [client] section with the mon_host option set. It is mostly created by the ceph config generate-minimal-conf. For instance,

[client]
mon host = [v2:192.168.1.7:3300,v1:192.168.1.7:6789], [v2:192.168.1.8:3300,v1:192.168.1.8:6789], [v2:192.168.1.9:3300,v1:192.168.1.9:6789]

Mount NFS-Ganesha exports

To make use of sessions, it is advised to mount NFS-Ganesha exports using NFSv4.1+ protocols. Platform-specific conventions must be followed while mounting NFS resources. On various Unix and Linux platforms, the following conventions are valid:

mount -t nfs -o nfsvers=4.1,proto=tcp <ganesha-host-name>:<ganesha-pseudo-path> <mount-point>

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Conclusion

The article briefly explains the steps from our Tech team to access the Ceph object gateway via the NFS-Ganesha file server.