V1708 Software Release

Software Release v1708

We're proud to announce our latest release v1708, which brings us a huge step forward in establishing croit as the best independent software solution to manage Ceph storage clusters.

If you haven't done so yet, we strongly recommend to upgrade to v1708 today to benefit from all these features:

Customize croit by Adding Cluster-Wide Hook Scripts

Write and run your own custom scripts that are executed on predefined triggers, such as a changes in the cluster health or the crush map. These hooks can also run on servers for flexible and customized configuration.

For example, use this to add a script to report the cluster health to your favorite chat messenger and stay up-to-date.

Use S.M.A.R.T. Information to See When Your Disks Risk Failure

S.M.A.R.T. is used to inform you when disks start to fail. This helps to predict disk failures, so that you can preemptively swap them.

Manage Your PGs (Placement Groups) Efficiently

With the new PG view it is now easy to search, sort, and filter PGs to find troublemakers.

You can trigger scrub, deep-scrubbing, or repairs on individual PGs.

Get Additional Information on Your Disk Status

Our new disk view shows you even more information about your disks. For example, you can see whether the corresponding Ceph daemon is running and which journal disk is used.

See the Services Running On Your Servers at a Glance

The new improved server view gives you a quick overview about all services deployed on your servers.

Control all services on all servers including OSDs conveniently with the new server view.

Know Your Latency with New "Operation Latency" KPI

An important KPI is the latency observed by clients. We now track the operation latency reported by OSDs.

This is the latency as seen by the clients. We have found this to be more useful than other commonly used latency metrics such as the filestore latencies.

Benefit From a More Robust Boot Experience

Live boots can be tricky: In the past, we encountered many different problems like timeouts or slow boots when working with vastly different network setups that we've encountered at our customers' sites.

We now ship an improved initramfs for a better and more robust boot experience, without requiring a special configuration for network switches.

In Addition You'll Find Numerous Minor CHanges to Make croit More Stable and Convenient, Among Others:

  • easy maintenance with a UI for Ceph flags
  • simpler mon and more robust addition of monitor services
  • services can now be stopped and started from the UI
  • OS image list optimized
  • NFS now supports async mode
  • the crush map has been restyled
  • autosuggest journal partitions
  • multiselect added for more views (disks, services, ...)
  • new column filter for all tables
  • support for Intel ixgbe with third party SFP+ modules
  • numerous bugs have been fixed
  • and many, many more

Update Your croit Software

If you are already using croit, we strongly recommend to upgrade to croit v1708 to get the best possible experience! Just enter the following two commands on the management node:

docker rm -f croit
docker run --net=host --restart=always --volumes-from croit-data --name croit -d croit/croit:1708

Disclaimer: please make sure that you have a working backup before entering those commands.