Proxmox VE unifies your compute and storage systems, that is, you can use the same physical nodes within a cluster for both computing (processing VMs and containers) and replicated storage. The traditional silos of compute and storage resources can be wrapped up into a single hyper-converged appliance. Separate storage networks (SANs) and connections via network attached storage (NAS) disappear. With the integration of Ceph, an open source software-defined storage platform, Proxmox VE has the ability to run and manage Ceph storage directly on the hypervisor nodes.
Ceph is a distributed object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability.
Some advantages of Ceph on Proxmox VE are:
For small to medium-sized deployments, it is possible to install a Ceph server for RADOS Block Devices (RBD) directly on your Proxmox VE cluster nodes (see Ceph RADOS Block Devices (RBD) Section 7.15, “Ceph RADOS Block Devices (RBD)”). Recent hardware has a lot of CPU power and RAM, so running storage services and VMs on the same node is possible.
To simplify management, we provide pveceph - a tool for installing and managing Ceph services on Proxmox VE nodes.
Ceph consists of multiple Daemons, for use as an RBD storage:
[11] Ceph architecture https://docs.ceph.com/en/nautilus/architecture/
[12] Ceph glossary https://docs.ceph.com/en/nautilus/glossary