Ceph minimum requirements

What are the bare minimum requirements for Ceph? I don’t mean the recommended requirements. I’m looking for the actual minimum for it to work reliably.

Reason being I am going to use it to create a local NFS share on each one of my nodes on Proxmox. In the VMs themselves I am going to use the hosts file to point a hostname to the local VM. I want each NFS share to stay synced with the others so I am investigating Ceph. However, I don’t have a lot of hardware to throw at it.

Edit:

Ceph Minimum Hardware Recommendations

That is the recommendations not the requirements. I am looking for some of the minimal requirements to get it to run with a small workload.

Well that’s as close as you’re going to get without just ignoring the recommendations and trying it anyway.

Reliability isn’t really tied to minimum hardware requirements, performance is. You can probably get it working on a potato but the performance will just be terrible.

Ceph runs on RPi (if you like to compile large stuff on RPi). But it will run on pretty much anything. But don’t expect any performing IOPS or throughput numbers when just cobbling up old stuff. Ceph likes cores, memory, low latency network and Enterprise NVMe. And a fast WAL disk in case your OSDs are HDDs

And there is no need for NFS share with Ceph. You can mount any CephFS and talk directly to the cluster. Benefit of shared storage. And Windows has a Ceph driver so you can use the share on Win too.

But creating a RBD and let the NFS server mount the RBD to then export it to other clients…possible, but adds complexity (additional NFS server) and I’d just go for mounting CephFS directly.

edit: CephFS has been in the Linux Kernel for some years now. Even RBD has both kernel (KRBD) and Userspace (libRBD) driver. So as far as Linux is concerned, it’s just like mounting an NFS export or iSCSI share.

Some would say that Ceph always runs like it is running on a potato :slight_smile: Clusters are great, but never fast. But I’ve seen some 80GB/s and 15M IOPS figures…you just need a lot of clients hammering the disks and capable hardware. Depends on use case, budget and expectations I guess

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It has the minimum on the bottom of the page. Whoops

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