Overview

This recipe describes how customers can standardize the deployment of Rook Ceph to provide a distributed storage system for block, file and object storage in Kubernetes clusters.

Rook is an open source cloud-native storage orchestrator, providing the platform, framework, and support for Ceph storage to natively integrate with cloud-native environments.

Ceph is a distributed storage system that provides file, block and object storage and is deployed in large scale production clusters.

Rook automates deployment and management of Ceph to provide self-managing, self-scaling, and self-healing storage services. The Rook operator does this by building on Kubernetes resources to deploy, configure, provision, scale, upgrade, and monitor Ceph.

The Ceph operator was declared stable in December 2018 in the Rook v0.9 release, providing a production storage platform for many years. Rook is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a graduated level project.

What Will You Do

In this exercise you will,

• Create the Rook Ceph add-ons using the official helm charts
• Use the add-ons in a custom cluster blueprint
• Apply this cluster blueprint to a managed cluster
• Deploy sample workloads to utilize the different storage types
• Enable the Ceph Dashboard for monitoring
• Expand the storage capacity of the Rook cluster by adding additional raw volumes

Assumptions

• You have already provisioned or imported one or more Kubernetes clusters using the controller
• The Kubernetes clusters have a minimum of 3 nodes
• You have met these prerequisites

Best Practices

• Use a minimum of three nodes in a Rook Ceph cluster (Less nodes can be used for testing purposes)
• Review the physical locations of storage nodes to increase redundancy and avoid co-location scenarios
• Ensure storage nodes running MONs have high performing disks (SSDs) for the MONs to run on
• Do not enforce limits on Ceph pods as this could impact storage performance
• Use jumbo frames in the networking of Rook Ceph pods

Note

Please contact Rafay Professional Services for custom support and guidance.

Recap

You are now ready to begin installing Rook Ceph as a custom add-on through a blueprint.