Guided text based installation UI, that runs ceph-ansible. The goal of the project is to provide a UI over the top of the complexity of ceph-ansible. Users new to Ceph may then interact with the UI to build their first Ceph cluster instead of first building up their Ansible knowledge.

• performs cluster & host sanity checks (primarily useful for prod deployments)
  • confirm the number of hosts are appropriate for the intended role
  • confirm host specs are appropriate (e.g. cpu core count matches #disks for osd hosts)
  • align to service collocation rules (e.g. mon + osd = bad idea)

• supports the following ceph roles; mons, osds, radosgw and mds
• defaults to a cluster name of 'ceph' (use --cluster-name= to override)
• allows selection of osd type, encryption, hosts and installation source
• validates deployment user exists (locally)
• hosts may be specified by name or mask
• hosts are checked for dns (2s dns lookup timeout per host - default)
• hosts are checked for passwordless ssh
• candidate hosts are probed (using ansible)
  • host specs are shown
  • hosts are validated against the intended role
• public and cluster networks are detected from the host probe
• admin may choose which networks are used based on the ones detected
• rgw interface defaults to the nic on the public network in this release
• uses plugins to create ceph-ansible group_vars files
• performs host sanity checks to confirm the host spec is appropriate for the intended role
• deployment playbook may be passed at run time
  • if the playbook file does not exist, the program aborts before starting the deployment process is tracked 'live' in the UI
• if the deployment fails,
  • the playbook may be rerun from the UI
  • playbook failures are shown in the UI (hostname and stderr)
• deployment playbook output is logged to a file for diagnostics (in addition to the normal /var/log/ansible.log file)

Does it work? Well in my testing, the short answer is YES but it needs a heap more testing on more varied configurations!

The UI elements are all in place, as is the ansible playbook integration and updates of the ansible yml files.

What's missing...automagic configuration of ssh from the installation host to the ceph hosts

Stay Tuned!

Here's an example run that illustrates the workflow for a small cluster of 3 nodes.

• ansible-2.4 or above
• python-urwid
• python2-paramiko
• ceph-ansible - tested against Master (Dec 2017)

1. download the archive to your ansible server
2. extract the archive and 'cd' to it
3. run the setup program

python setup.py install --record files.txt  

4. to run copilot

cd /usr/share/ceph-ansible  
copilot

NB. You need to cd to the ceph-ansible directory, since the playbook needs to reference ceph-ansibles roles, actions etc

Here's my backlog

1. handle ssh setup instead of relying on the admin. i.e. add a credentials page which gets populated with the hosts that had passwordless login failures, to prompt the admin for passwords to set up the missing ssh keys.
2. support iscsi gateways role
3. post install config - what about enabling add on pages through plugins for radosgw config for example.