Chapter 8. Deploy Hyper-Converged Ceph Cluster

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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:

Tip

We highly recommend to get familiar with Ceph [10], its architecture [11] and vocabulary [12].