Upgrading Ceph
Cephadm can safely upgrade Ceph from one bugfix release to the next. For example, you can upgrade from v15.2.0 (the first Octopus release) to the next point release, v15.2.1.
The automated upgrade process follows Ceph best practices. For example:
The upgrade order starts with managers, monitors, then other daemons.
Each daemon is restarted only after Ceph indicates that the cluster will remain available.
Note
The Ceph cluster health status is likely to switch to
HEALTH_WARNING during the upgrade.
Note
In case a host of the cluster is offline, the upgrade is paused.
Starting the upgrade
Before you use cephadm to upgrade Ceph, verify that all hosts are currently online and that your cluster is healthy by running the following command:
ceph -s
To upgrade (or downgrade) to a specific release, run the following command:
ceph orch upgrade start --ceph-version <version>
For example, to upgrade to v16.2.6, run the following command:
ceph orch upgrade start --ceph-version 16.2.6
Note
From version v16.2.6 the Docker Hub registry is no longer used, so if you use Docker you have to point it to the image in the quay.io registry:
ceph orch upgrade start --image quay.io/ceph/ceph:v16.2.6
Monitoring the upgrade
Determine (1) whether an upgrade is in progress and (2) which version the cluster is upgrading to by running the following command:
ceph orch upgrade status
Watching the progress bar during a Ceph upgrade
During the upgrade, a progress bar is visible in the ceph status output. It looks like this:
# ceph -s
[...]
progress:
Upgrade to docker.io/ceph/ceph:v15.2.1 (00h 20m 12s)
[=======.....................] (time remaining: 01h 43m 31s)
Watching the cephadm log during an upgrade
Watch the cephadm log by running the following command:
ceph -W cephadm
Canceling an upgrade
You can stop the upgrade process at any time by running the following command:
ceph orch upgrade stop
Post upgrade actions
In case the new version is based on cephadm, once done with the upgrade the user
has to update the cephadm package (or ceph-common package in case the user
doesn’t use cephadm shell) to a version compatible with the new version.
Potential problems
There are a few health alerts that can arise during the upgrade process.
UPGRADE_NO_STANDBY_MGR
This alert (UPGRADE_NO_STANDBY_MGR) means that Ceph does not detect an
active standby manager daemon. In order to proceed with the upgrade, Ceph
requires an active standby manager daemon (which you can think of in this
context as “a second manager”).
You can ensure that Cephadm is configured to run 2 (or more) managers by running the following command:
ceph orch apply mgr 2 # or more
You can check the status of existing mgr daemons by running the following command:
ceph orch ps --daemon-type mgr
If an existing mgr daemon has stopped, you can try to restart it by running the following command:
ceph orch daemon restart <name>
UPGRADE_FAILED_PULL
This alert (UPGRADE_FAILED_PULL) means that Ceph was unable to pull the
container image for the target version. This can happen if you specify a
version or container image that does not exist (e.g. “1.2.3”), or if the
container registry can not be reached by one or more hosts in the cluster.
To cancel the existing upgrade and to specify a different target version, run the following commands:
ceph orch upgrade stop
ceph orch upgrade start --ceph-version <version>
Using customized container images
For most users, upgrading requires nothing more complicated than specifying the
Ceph version number to upgrade to. In such cases, cephadm locates the specific
Ceph container image to use by combining the container_image_base
configuration option (default: docker.io/ceph/ceph) with a tag of
vX.Y.Z.
But it is possible to upgrade to an arbitrary container image, if that’s what you need. For example, the following command upgrades to a development build:
ceph orch upgrade start --image quay.io/ceph-ci/ceph:recent-git-branch-name
For more information about available container images, see Ceph Container Images.
Staggered Upgrade
Some users may prefer to upgrade components in phases rather than all at once.
The upgrade command, starting in 16.2.11 and 17.2.1 allows parameters
to limit which daemons are upgraded by a single upgrade command. The options in
include daemon_types, services, hosts and limit. daemon_types
takes a comma-separated list of daemon types and will only upgrade daemons of those
types. services is mutually exclusive with daemon_types, only takes services
of one type at a time (e.g. can’t provide an OSD and RGW service at the same time), and
will only upgrade daemons belonging to those services. hosts can be combined
with daemon_types or services or provided on its own. The hosts parameter
follows the same format as the command line options for Daemon Placement.
limit takes an integer > 0 and provides a numerical limit on the number of
daemons cephadm will upgrade. limit can be combined with any of the other
parameters. For example, if you specify to upgrade daemons of type osd on host
Host1 with limit set to 3, cephadm will upgrade (up to) 3 osd daemons on
Host1.
Example: specifying daemon types and hosts:
ceph orch upgrade start --image <image-name> --daemon-types mgr,mon --hosts host1,host2
Example: specifying services and using limit:
ceph orch upgrade start --image <image-name> --services rgw.example1,rgw.example2 --limit 2
Note
Cephadm strictly enforces an order to the upgrade of daemons that is still present
in staggered upgrade scenarios. The current upgrade ordering is
mgr -> mon -> crash -> osd -> mds -> rgw -> rbd-mirror -> cephfs-mirror -> iscsi -> nfs.
If you specify parameters that would upgrade daemons out of order, the upgrade
command will block and note which daemons will be missed if you proceed.
Note
Upgrade commands with limiting parameters will validate the options before beginning the upgrade, which may require pulling the new container image. Do not be surprised if the upgrade start command takes a while to return when limiting parameters are provided.
Note
In staggered upgrade scenarios (when a limiting parameter is provided) monitoring stack daemons including Prometheus and node-exporter are refreshed after the Manager daemons have been upgraded. Do not be surprised if Manager upgrades thus take longer than expected. Note that the versions of monitoring stack daemons may not change between Ceph releases, in which case they are only redeployed.
Upgrading to a version that supports staggered upgrade from one that doesn’t
While upgrading from a version that already supports staggered upgrades the process simply requires providing the necessary arguments. However, if you wish to upgrade to a version that supports staggered upgrade from one that does not, there is a workaround. It requires first manually upgrading the Manager daemons and then passing the limiting parameters as usual.
Warning
Make sure you have multiple running mgr daemons before attempting this procedure.
To start with, determine which Manager is your active one and which are standby. This
can be done in a variety of ways such as looking at the ceph -s output. Then,
manually upgrade each standby mgr daemon with:
ceph orch daemon redeploy mgr.example1.abcdef --image <new-image-name>
Note
If you are on a very early version of cephadm (early Octopus) the orch daemon redeploy
command may not have the --image flag. In that case, you must manually set the
Manager container image ceph config set mgr container_image <new-image-name> and then
redeploy the Manager ceph orch daemon redeploy mgr.example1.abcdef
At this point, a Manager fail over should allow us to have the active Manager be one running the new version.
ceph mgr fail
Verify the active Manager is now one running the new version. To complete the Manager upgrading:
ceph orch upgrade start --image <new-image-name> --daemon-types mgr
You should now have all your Manager daemons on the new version and be able to specify the limiting parameters for the rest of the upgrade.