Introduction

Ceph is a distributed object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability - See more at: http://ceph.com.

Proxmox VE supports Ceph’s RADOS Block Device to be used for VM disks. The Ceph storage services are usually hosted on external, dedicated storage nodes. Such storage clusters can sum up to several hundreds of nodes, providing petabytes of storage capacity.

For smaller deployments, it is also possible to run Ceph services directly on your Proxmox VE nodes. Recent hardware has plenty of CPU power and RAM, so running storage services and VMs on same node is possible.

This articles describes how to setup and run Ceph storage services directly on Proxmox VE nodes.

Note:

Ceph Storage integration (CLI and GUI) is introduced in Proxmox VE 3.2 as technology preview and already available as beta in the pvetest repository.

Advantages

Easy setup and management with CLI and GUI support on Proxmox VE
Thin provisioning
Snapshots support
Self healing
No single point of failure
Scalable to the exabyte level
Setup pools with different performance and redundancy characteristics
Data is replicated, making it fault tolerant
Runs on economical commodity hardware
No need for hardware RAID controllers
Easy management
Open source

Recommended hardware

You need at least three identical servers for the redundant setup. Here is the specifications of one of our test lab clusters with Proxmox VE and Ceph (three nodes):

Dual Xeon E5-2620v2, 32 GB RAM, Intel S2600CP mainboard, Intel RMM, Chenbro 2U chassis with eight 3.5” hot-swap drive bays, 2 fixed 2.5" SSD bays
10 GBit network for Ceph traffic (one Intel X540-T2 in each server, one 10Gb switch - Netgear XS712T)
Single enterprise class SSD for the Proxmox VE installation (because we run Ceph monitors there and quite a lot of logs), we use one Intel DC S3500 80 GB per host.
Single, fast and reliable enterprise class SSD for Ceph Journal. For this test lab cluster, we used Samsung SSD 840 PRO with 240 GB
SATA disk for storing the data (OSDs), use at least 4 disks/OSDs per server, more OSD disks are faster. We use four Seagate Constellation ES.3 SATA 6Gb (4TB model) per server.

This setup delivers 48 TB storage. By using the redundancy of 3, you can store up to 16 TB (100%). But to be prepared for failed disks and hosts, you should never fill up your storage with 100 %.

By adding more disks, the storage can be expanded up to 96 TB just by plugging in additional disks into the free drive bays. Of course, you can add more servers too as soon as your business is growing.

Installation of Proxmox VE

Before you start with Ceph, you need a working Proxmox VE cluster with 3 nodes (or more). We install Proxmox VE on a fast and reliable enterprise class SSD, so we can use all bays for OSD data. Just follow the well known instructions on Installation and Proxmox VE 2.0 Cluster.

Note:

Use ext4 if you install on SSD (at the boot prompt of the installation ISO you can specify parameters, e.g. "linux ext4 swapsize=4").

Network for Ceph

All nodes need access to a separate 10Gb network interface, exclusively used for Ceph. We use network 10.10.10.0/24 for this tutorial.

It is highly recommended to use 10Gb for that network to avoid performance problems. Bonding can be used to increase availability.

First node

The network setup (ceph private network) from our first node contains:

# from /etc/network/interfaces
auto eth2
iface eth2 inet static
    address  10.10.10.1
    netmask  255.255.255.0

Second node

The network setup (ceph private network) from our second node contains:

# from /etc/network/interfaces
auto eth2
iface eth2 inet static
    address  10.10.10.2
    netmask  255.255.255.0

Third node

The network setup (ceph private network) from our third node contains:

# from /etc/network/interfaces
auto eth2
iface eth2 inet static
    address  10.10.10.3
    netmask  255.255.255.0

Installation of Ceph packages

You now need to select 3 nodes and install the Ceph software packages there. We wrote a small command line utility called 'pveceph' which helps you performing this tasks. Login to all your nodes and execute the following on all:

node1# pveceph install

node2# pveceph install

node3# pveceph install

This sets up an 'apt' package repository in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ceph.list and installs the required software.

Create initial Ceph configuration

After installation of packages, you need to create an initial Ceph configuration on just one node, based on your private network:

node1# pveceph init --network 10.10.10.0/24

This creates an initial config at /etc/pve/ceph.conf. That file is automatically distributed to all Proxmox VE nodes by using pmxcfs. The command also creates a symbolic link from /etc/ceph/ceph.conf pointing to that file. So you can simply run Ceph commands without the need to specify a configuration file.

Creating Ceph Monitors

After that you can create the first Ceph monitor service using:

node1# pveceph createmon
node1# service ceph start

You should run 3 monitors, one on each node. So please login to the next node and run:

node2# pveceph init
node2# pveceph createmon
node2# service ceph start

And execute the same steps on the third node:

node3# pveceph init
node3# pveceph createmon
node3# service ceph start

After that you have three running Ceph monitors, and you can start using the Proxmox GUI to manage and view your Ceph configuration. But of course, you can continue to use the command line tools (CLI), like we describe it here in this wiki article.

Creating Ceph OSDs

First, please be careful when you initialize your OSD disks, because it basically removes all existing data from those disks. So it is important to select the correct device names. The Proxmox VE Ceph GUI displays a list of all disk, together with device names, usage information and serial numbers.

Creating OSDs can be done via GUI - self explaining - or via CLI, explained here:

Having that said, initializing an OSD can be done with:

# pveceph createosd /dev/sd[X]

If you want to use a dedicated SSD journal disk:

# pveceph createosd /dev/sd[X] -journal_dev dev/sd[X]

Example: /dev/sdf as data disk (4TB) and /dev/sdb is the dedicated SSD journal disk

# pveceph createosd /dev/sdf -journal_dev /dev/sdb

This partitions the disk (data and journal partition), create filesystems, starts the OSD and add it to the existing crush map. So afterward the OSD is running and fully functional. Please create at least 12 OSDs, distributed among your nodes (4 on each node).

It should be noted that this command refuses to initialize disk when it detects existing data. So if you want to overwrite a disk you should remove existing data first. You can do that using

# ceph-disk zap /dev/sd[X]

You can create OSDs containing both journal and data partitions or you can place the journal on a dedicated SSD. Using a SSD journal disk is highly recommended it you expect good performance.

Ceph Pools

The standard installation creates some default pools, so you can either use the standard 'rbd' pool, or create your own pools using the GUI.

You can then configure Proxmox VE to use such pools to store VM images, just use the GUI ("Add Storage": RBD). A typical entry in the Proxmox VE storage configuration looks like:

# from /etc/pve/storage.cfg
rbd: my-ceph-pool
       monhost 10.10.10.201 10.10.10.202 10.10.10.203
       pool rbd
       content images
       username admin

You also need to copy the keyring to a predefined location

# cd /etc/pve/priv/
# mkdir ceph
# cp ceph.client.admin.keyring ceph/my-ceph-pool.keyring

Why do we need a new command line tool (pveceph)?

Proxmox VE provides a distributed file system (pmxcfs) to store configuration files.

We use this to store the Ceph configuration. The advantage is that all nodes see the same file, and there is no need to copy configuration data around using ssh/scp. The tool can also use additional information from your Proxmox VE setup.

Tools like ceph-deploy cannot take advantage of that architecture.

Video Tutorials

TBD: Proxmox VE Youtube channel

Ceph Server

Contents