Book Image

Ceph Cookbook

Book Image

Ceph Cookbook

Overview of this book

Ceph is a unified, distributed storage system designed for excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. This cutting-edge technology has been transforming the storage industry, and is evolving rapidly as a leader in software-defined storage space, extending full support to cloud platforms such as Openstack and Cloudstack, including virtualization platforms. It is the most popular storage backend for Openstack, public, and private clouds, so is the first choice for a storage solution. Ceph is backed by RedHat and is developed by a thriving open source community of individual developers as well as several companies across the globe. This book takes you from a basic knowledge of Ceph to an expert understanding of the most advanced features, walking you through building up a production-grade Ceph storage cluster and helping you develop all the skills you need to plan, deploy, and effectively manage your Ceph cluster. Beginning with the basics, you’ll create a Ceph cluster, followed by block, object, and file storage provisioning. Next, you’ll get a step-by-step tutorial on integrating it with OpenStack and building a Dropbox-like object storage solution. We’ll also take a look at federated architecture and CephFS, and you’ll dive into Calamari and VSM for monitoring the Ceph environment. You’ll develop expert knowledge on troubleshooting and benchmarking your Ceph storage cluster. Finally, you’ll get to grips with the best practices to operate Ceph in a production environment.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Ceph Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Choosing the hardware and software components for Ceph


As mentioned earlier, Ceph hardware selection requires meticulous planning based on your environment and storage needs. The type of hardware component, network infrastructure, and cluster design are some critical factors you should consider during the initial phase of Ceph storage planning. There is no golden rule for Ceph hardware selection as it depends on various factors such as budget, performance versus capacity, or both, fault tolerance level, and the use case.

Ceph is hardware agnostic; organizations are free to select any hardware of their choice based on budget, performance/capacity requirements, or use case. They have full control over their storage cluster and the underlying infrastructure. Also, one of the advantages of Ceph is that it supports heterogeneous hardware. You can mix hardware brands while creating your Ceph cluster infrastructure. For example, while building your Ceph cluster, you can mix hardware from different...