There are a number of factors to consider when designing the operating system deployment of your Ceph clusters. Some, like the complement of packages to be installed can be tweaked later. Others, especially the size and layout of boot drive partitions and filesystems, would require substantial effort to adjust after the fact. It is best to carefully plan in advance when bootstrapping your systems.
While some adventurous Ceph admins have worked to deploy Ceph on other operating systems such as Solaris or FreeBSD, Ceph is designed to be deployed on modern Linux systems. Determined implementers can build Ceph from source code, but most sites deploy pre-built packages. Ceph is available as .deb
packages for Debian-derived distributions including Ubuntu, and as .rpm
packages for Red Hat family distributions including RHEL and CentOS. SUSE also shows significant commitment to Ceph and offers packages as well.
While Ceph's backend servers run...