Cinder HA Active-Active specs up for review 1

It’s been some time since the last time I talked here about High Availability Active-Active configurations in Openstack’s Cinder service, and now I am quite pleased -and a little bit embarrassed it took so long- to announce that all specs are now up for reviewing. Three months ago I wrote a couple of post proposing different solutions that would allow Cinder Volume Nodes to support Active-Active configurations. One of them played with AMQP’s ACKs and was a little bit complex […]

Simpler Road to Cinder Active-Active 2

Last week I presented a possible solution to support Active-Active configurations in Cinder, and as much as it pains me to admit it, it was too complex, so this week I’ll present a simpler solution. Change of heart I really liked last week’s solution to allow Active-Active HA configurations in Cinder, but it was brought to my attention that the complexity it added to the component was not worth the little benefits it brought (like recovering queued jobs). It didn’t […]

A Cinder Road to Active/Active HA 8

We all want to see OpenStack’s Block Storage Service operating in High Availability with Active/Active node configurations, and we are all keen to contribute to make it happen, but what does it take to get there? Wasn’t Cinder already Active-Active? Maybe you’ve been told that Cinder could be configured as Active/Active, or you’ve even seen deployments configured this way, or you just assumed that this was supported, after all it’s the Cloud, and we like our Clouds redundant, resilient and […]

Cinder’s API Races

Openstack‘s Block Storage project Cinder intends to allow High Availability Active-Active node configurations in the next Liberty Cycle, and for that there are a number of changes that need to happen. One of those changes is making state changes (changes in status field) atomic inside Cinder, and for that there are different solutions, this code tries to provide some insight into these solutions in an empirical way. What’s the problem? Right now Cinder has sections where status is checked for […]

Inside Cinder’s Incremental Backup 10

I’ve been asked a couple of times how Cinder’s Incremental Backup works and what do I actually mean when I say we need to rework Ceph’s Backup driver to support Cinder’s Incremental Backup. So I’ll try to explain both in this post. Backup Workflow Incremental Backup in Cinder was designed with Swift back-end in mind, so reference implementation is versatile enough to handle size limitations on the back-end, and new drivers can relatively easily extend from this implementation to support […]

Cinder Volume Back Up Automation 8

In my previous post on OpenStack’s volume backups I gave an overview of Cinder’s Backup service current status and I mentioned that some of the limitations that currently exist could be easily overcome scripting a helper tool. In this post I’m going to explain different options to create such a script and provide one as a sample/reference. Automate what? Among current Cinder Backup service limitations these are some things that can be automated: Backup in-use volumes keeping reference to original […]

OpenStack’s Volume Backup Status 5

Why Back Up Cloud Volumes? When working in the Cloud the idea of doing backups like in the old days may seen counter intuitive. After all, the main reasons for having backups are recovering data after it’s lost, by deletion or corruption, and recovering it from an earlier time, and you have those covered with fast volume snapshots and the use of fault tolerant back-ends like Ceph, that replicate data, for your volumes. So, why would you still need old […]

VBox & VMware in SecureBoot Linux 23

2016-07-11: An updated version of this post has been published, we recommend reading it instead. If you have a Linux system running in Secure Boot and you install VirtualBox or VMware player you will see, with some frustration, that you won’t be able to run any VMs. This post also applies if you are running your system with module signature verification enabled (CONFIG_MODULE_SIG) even if it’s not running in Secure Boot. I know this is an old issue, but I […]

Euler Project is down :’-(

  I don’t know how could I have missed this, as I don’t recall reading this news anywhere, but I only found out today when I tried to access the website and this message popped out. So, the sad news is that Project Euler’s website has been down since the 15th of June and there is no information on when it will back up. I certainly hope they can get it back up soon. Here’s a Wikipedia link on Project Euler if you need to […]

W8 BSOD

W8’s BSoD has an emoticon, are you kidding me? 1

  For the past 2 days I’ve been playing around with Android Studio, and I don’t know what’s been more frustrating, the fact that it crashes my Windows 8.1 every now and then or that Windows 8’s Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) has an emoticon. I would like to know who first thought of the idea of including a sad emoticon in this screen, and what train of thought led him to believe that it was, in fact, a good idea. […]