Ceph cluster on a single machine

Ceph is an open-source, distributed storage platform that provides object, block, and file storage in a single system. It’s highly scalable, reliable, and designed to run on commodity hardware. For enterprise environments, Ceph is also available as a supported commercial offering through Red Hat, known as Red Hat Ceph Storage.

Sometimes you need to try something out—explore ceph or how an application behaves, or verifying an integration like Kubernetes CSI. In these cases, using a system that’s easy to deploy and manage, such as Ceph, makes the whole process faster and more efficient.

You can use either the enterprise distribution of Ceph provided by Red Hat or the upstream community edition. This tutorial uses Red Hat Ceph; however, the equivalent steps can be followed using the community version as well.

You’ll need a Linux distribution installed on your system. This guide uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 as an example, but any distribution supported by Ceph will work.

You can use either a virtual machine or a physical server. Ensure the system has at least 2–3 additional disks dedicated for use with Ceph storage.

Install Ceph:-

1. enable the Ceph repositories
   

$ sudo subscription-manager repos –enable=rhceph-9-tools-for-rhel-9-x86_64-rpms

2. Install required packages to setup ceph

$ sudo dnf install podman cephadm ceph-common ceph-base -y

3. Use the cephadm command to initialize and bootstrap the Ceph cluster

$ sudo cephadm bootstrap \

–cluster-network 10.10.20.0/24 \ # update the network and mon ip

–mon-ip 10.10.20.20 \

–registry-url registry.redhat.io \

–registry-username redhatuser \ # update rhel username

–registry-password ‘pwd \ # update rhel user password

–dashboard-password-noupdate \

–initial-dashboard-user admin \

–initial-dashboard-password xxx \. # update password

–allow-fqdn-hostname \

–single-host-defaults

4. Add an OSD inside a Ceph cluster.

$ sudo ceph orch apply osd –all-available-devices

5. Access Ceph dashboard using URL

https://FQDN:8443