7.15. Ceph RADOS Block Devices (RBD)

Storage pool type: rbd

Ceph is a distributed object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability. RADOS block devices implement a feature rich block level storage, and you get the following advantages:

Note

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 backend supports the common storage properties nodes, disable, content, and the following rbd specific properties:

Configuration Example for a external Ceph cluster (/etc/pve/storage.cfg). 

rbd: ceph-external
        monhost 10.1.1.20 10.1.1.21 10.1.1.22
        pool ceph-external
        content images
        username admin

If you use cephx authentication, you need to copy the keyfile from your external Ceph cluster to a Proxmox VE host.

Create the directory /etc/pve/priv/ceph with

mkdir /etc/pve/priv/ceph

Then copy the keyring

scp <cephserver>:/etc/ceph/ceph.client.admin.keyring /etc/pve/priv/ceph/<STORAGE_ID>.keyring

The keyring must be named to match your <STORAGE_ID>. Copying the keyring generally requires root privileges.

If Ceph is installed locally on the PVE cluster, this is done automatically by pveceph or in the GUI.

The rbd backend is a block level storage, and implements full snapshot and clone functionality.