Book Image

Ceph: Designing and Implementing Scalable Storage Systems

By : Michael Hackett, Vikhyat Umrao, Karan Singh, Nick Fisk, Anthony D'Atri, Vaibhav Bhembre
Book Image

Ceph: Designing and Implementing Scalable Storage Systems

By: Michael Hackett, Vikhyat Umrao, Karan Singh, Nick Fisk, Anthony D'Atri, Vaibhav Bhembre

Overview of this book

This Learning Path takes you through the basics of Ceph all the way to gaining in-depth understanding of its advanced features. You’ll gather skills to plan, deploy, and manage your Ceph cluster. After an introduction to the Ceph architecture and its core projects, you’ll be able to set up a Ceph cluster and learn how to monitor its health, improve its performance, and troubleshoot any issues. By following the step-by-step approach of this Learning Path, you’ll learn how Ceph integrates with OpenStack, Glance, Manila, Swift, and Cinder. With knowledge of federated architecture and CephFS, you’ll use Calamari and VSM to monitor the Ceph environment. In the upcoming chapters, you’ll study the key areas of Ceph, including BlueStore, erasure coding, and cache tiering. More specifically, you’ll discover what they can do for your storage system. In the concluding chapters, you will develop applications that use Librados and distributed computations with shared object classes, and see how Ceph and its supporting infrastructure can be optimized. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the practical knowledge of operating Ceph in a production environment. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Ceph Cookbook by Michael Hackett, Vikhyat Umrao and Karan Singh • Mastering Ceph by Nick Fisk • Learning Ceph, Second Edition by Anthony D'Atri, Vaibhav Bhembre and Karan Singh
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Planning a Ceph deployment


A Ceph storage cluster is created on top of the commodity hardware. This commodity hardware includes industry-standard servers loaded with physical disk drives that provide storage capacity and some standard networking infrastructure. These servers run standard Linux distributions and Ceph software on top of them. The following diagram helps you understand the basic view of a Ceph cluster:

As explained earlier, Ceph does not have a very specific hardware requirement. For the purpose of testing and learning, we can deploy a Ceph cluster on top of virtual machines. In this section and in the later chapters of this book, we will be working on a Ceph cluster that is built on top of virtual machines. It's very convenient to use a virtual environment to test Ceph, as it's fairly easy to set up and can be destroyed and recreated anytime. It's good to know that a virtual infrastructure for the Ceph cluster should not be used for a production environment, and you might face serious problems with this.