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Comment by darksim905 | Hacker News Reader

I have a dumb question when it comes to Ceph:

Whatever happened to the good ol' days of best practices? At least with Microsoft products, say, something like SCCM, you have metrics that can tell you what works & what doesn't work. Or, a software product on Microsoft's platform like PDQ Inventory/PDQ Deploy. I know with a decent 4GB memory/60GB HDD/1Gbps network, I can manage 40-50 desktop PCs fairly easily.

Do people not do baselines anymore? There's so much random documentation for Ceph. It's poorly documented. There are no logical help switches for it. And there's no "Oh, you should have x mons for this many OSDs"

It's just poor. Poor all around. :-(

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If you're operating it in an environment where you need it to be up with multiple 9s or you're losing money, you call Red Hat and pay for a consulting engagement. As an open source piece of software, I think it's significantly harder to keep up with the level of public documentation that MSFT can with some of their products.

They'll provide RH certified packages that have been tested in-depth on certain OSes (not Gentoo), provide someone on-site to make sure you're following their best practices around configuration, upgrade process, etc.

Ceph is a very complex distributed system and it's very difficult (IMO) to nail down what the best practices are around hardware and resources - it depends almost entirely on the workload, and requirements out of it. If you're operating it solely for sequential RGW workloads, it looks _completely_ different than what you'd want for high performance RBD devices.

They do have some documentation online, to the extent that they can: separate networks, 5 MON nodes (to avoid one going down and ruining your day), etc. I just think it's significantly harder given that it's used on such a diverse set of workloads, which is why they are more than happy to sell consulting for this.

I was forced by management at a previous gig to use a RedHat consultant to set up a satellite server. In the end, I had to help him set it up after it became clear he wasn't able to do it on his own. It was a huge waste of money, and I'd caution anybody to pay close attention to contract management if you're going to get them in.

Satellite is a product sold to management, not to people who do not mind the command line.

That can be reflected a little bit in Red Hat technicians. Do no let that affect your judgement of their technical and operational skills.

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