OK. I moved from Ceph Octopus to Pacific.
The reason I originally settled on Octopus was I was thinking that it was the newest release that had direct CentOS 7 support for my older servers. I was wrong. Actually CentOS 7 maxed out at Nautilus.
Octopus has been a problematic release. A bug kept scheduled cephadm tasks from executing if even the most trivial warnings existed. And trivial warnings were endemic, since there were major issues in trying to get rgw running. Caused, in part, I think, from a mish-mash of setups via older and cephadm component deployments. Certain directories are not in the same place between the two.
I also couldn’t remove failed rbs pool setups. They kept coming back after I deleted them, no matter how brutally I did so.
And finally, a major lock-up crept into the NFS server subsystem. Although it turns out that the ceph mount utility for Nautilus works just fine for me with Octopus servers so I was able to re-define a lot of NFS stuff to use Ceph directly.
Before I proceed, I should note that despite all my whinging and whining, the Ceph filesystem share has been rock solid. Much more so than Gluster was. Despite all the mayhem and random blunderings, the worst I ever did to the filesystem was trash performance when I under-deployed OSDs. Never did I have to wipe it all out and restore from backups.
OK. So I finally bit the bullet. I’d fortuitiously run across the instructions to level-up all the Ceph depoyments to be cephadm based the day before. Now I followed the simple upgrade instructions.
I had concerns because I had a number of failed rgw daemons I couldn’t get rid of, but actually the worst thing that happened was it spend all night flailing because an OSD had gone offline. Restarted that and things began to happen. Lots of progress messages. Occasional stalls (despite what one source told me it’s NOT desirable to have my Ganesha pool have no replicas!),
But amazingly it was done! Now deleted rgw dæmos stay deleted! I might even get them hooked into my VM deployments! And since one of Pacific’s improvements had to do with NFS, I hope Ganesha will be happy again.