Exploring the world of software-defined storage? Discover how Ceph stands out with its focus on limitless scalability. Learn Ceph’s key aspects, benefits and drawbacks. 

As you remember from my previous article, I have been interested in testing the performance levels of two virtual SAN configurations from different vendors. I got my results, but this experience prompted me to continue. Here, I’ve chosen to try another configuration for performance comparison, albeit with only a slightly different list of participants. Since no one needs an introduction from VMware vSAN, I’d like to say a few words about its companion – Ceph. Basically, it is an object-based software storage platform. I know that doesn’t sound epic at all, but Ceph is also completely fault-tolerant, uses off-the-shelf hardware, and is extremely scalable. The most interesting thing is that some Ceph releases apply erasure-coded data pools so that it would be a less resource-hungry solution than traditional replicated pools. In practice, that means the following: when you store an object in a Ceph storage cluster, the algorithm divides this object into data and coding chunks, stored in different OSDs (that way, the system could lose an OSD without actually losing the data). Now, that’s when I thought that theoretically, Ceph could make a good virtualization platform (proper configuration, of course), so I had to see whether it would be justified in terms of time and resources spent. Naturally, I hardly could have done it without a credible comparison, hence VMware vSAN (with a similar configuration, of course, otherwise it would make no sense). So, shall we?

This article describes the deployment of a Ceph cluster in one instance or as it’s called “Ceph-all-in-one”. As you may know, Ceph is a unified Software-Defined Storage system designed for great performance, reliability, and scalability. With the help of Ceph, you can build an environment with the desired size. You can start with a one-node system and there are no limits in its sizing. I will show you how to build the Ceph cluster on top of one virtual machine (or instance). You should never use such scenario in production, only for testing purposes. The series of articles will guide you through the deployment and configuration of different Ceph cluster builds.