Vault 2017

Ceph provides a resilient and scalable software defined storage model. Ceph's block storage layer, RADOS block device (RBD), is widely used for virtual machine disks and is the most popular block storage used with OpenStack.

One of the most requested capabilities for Ceph has been the ability to continuously mirror RBD images to an offsite, disaster recovery location. Previously, disaster recovery with Ceph was a manual process, using differential snapshots and custom scripts. With multi-site mirroring, Ceph gains the ability to have near real-time consistency in separate geographical locations.

In this session, we’ll introduce the RBD journaling and mirroring features that provide this new ability. We’ll provide an overview of the architecture, explain the intended use cases, and show how to configure mirroring between Ceph clusters.