Chapter 10. Deploying Ceph
This chapter covers
- Preparing servers for Ceph deployment
- Deploying Ceph using the ceph-deploy tool
- Basic Ceph operations
Ceph (http://ceph.com) is an open source storage platform based on RADOS (http://ceph.com/papers/weil-rados-pdsw07.pdf) that can be used to provide block-, file-, and object-level storage services using commodity servers. Ceph works in a distributed architecture with the goal of eliminating single points of failure by replicating both user and cluster management data. So why is a chapter about Ceph included in an OpenStack book? Based on OpenStack community user surveys, Ceph is the most popular choice for OpenStack storage.[1] In chapter 7 you configured Cinder to use LVM to manage volume storage, but in a production deployment you might use a Ceph backend in place of LVM to provide storage for Cinder to manage.
1See “OpenStack users share how their deployments stack up,” http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/openstack-users-share-how-their-deployments-stack-up.
Although no OpenStack book would be complete without including Ceph, its detailed design and operation is beyond the scope of this chapter. In this chapter, you’ll walk through a deployment of Ceph using the ceph-deploy deployment tool provided by the developers of Ceph.