It’s alive! Image live migration, live import and Instant restore with Ceph RBD

Abstract

Image live migration in Ceph RBD has been extended in the Pacific release to include live migration from external sources. We will present how this new expanded capability as well as up and coming contributions enable several key enterprise features and capabilities. The first is to migrate images between Ceph clusters with no down time. The second facilitates live import of images into Ceph – namely have images stored outside of Ceph run as RBD images with instant access. New contributions aim to allow doing this with many source formats and while maintaining sparsity of the source images utilizing an nbd mount point to the source. The third couples differential back-ups with an instant restore functionality - start running instantaneously from the backup source even if it is on a cold storage like an S3 object store.