Earlier in this chapter, we discussed some traits of selecting the right hardware depending on your needs and use case. You should make the necessary arrangements for your cluster hardware including networking components. The cluster hardware should be mounted, cabled, powered on, and should have valid networking between its nodes. Once you are ready with the hardware, the next task is to perform software arrangements for your cluster.
Ceph is a software-defined storage system, which runs on top of a Linux-based operating system. All the cluster nodes should be installed with Ceph-supported operating system. As of now, the valid operating system choice for running a Ceph cluster is RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSuse. You can check out more information for supported platforms on http://ceph.com/docs/master/start/os-recommendations/.