We can test deploy Ceph in a sandbox environment using Oracle VirtualBox virtual machines. This virtual setup can help us discover and perform experiments with Ceph storage clusters as if we are working in a real environment. Since Ceph is an open source software-defined storage deployed on top of commodity hardware in a production environment, we can imitate a fully functioning Ceph environment on virtual machines, instead of real-commodity hardware, for our testing purposes.

Oracle VirtualBox is a free software available at http://www.virtualbox.org for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. We must fulfil system requirements for the VirtualBox software so that it can function properly during our testing. The Ceph test environment that we will create on VirtualBox virtual machines will be used for the rest of the chapters in this book. We assume that your host operating system is a Unix variant; for Microsoft windows, host machines use an absolute path...