Ceph: Can I use ceph storage as VM filesystem or object storage?

[Francesco Piraneo G.]

Hi all,
for an upcoming service, I'm evaluating the virtualization software and Proxmox is a good candidate; I'm actually testing on one bare iron machine and on three VMs here on my desktop to play a bit with ceph.
We plan to need for the first year of operation about 50Tb on standard SAS devices, going to 1700Tb on standard SAS devices plus an extra 1.5Tb on SSD for database storage. For the 6th and coming years we hope to increase the storage so scalability is a must.

Then we thought about ceph.

The storage space must be accessed by our app as object storage; ceph as basis is an object storage (accessible with REST) but as I've seen in my (limited) knowledge of Proxmox, it seems only accessible as rooms for VMs.

Am I wrong?

Can be the ceph configured with Proxmox accessed also with REST or mapped as block device or filesystem on a linux VM mountpoint?

Thank you very much for your help.
Francesco

 

[Stefan_R]

The Ceph integration in Proxmox is just an assisting layer to provision VMs and containers with underlying Ceph Block Storage devices. The Ceph cluster created can of course also be used for other tasks (although this is not supported by Proxmox tooling, and care has to be taken if one wants to use Ceph both as VM storage and for custom tasks).

Ceph itself does support Object Storage[1] and even a native POSIX-compliant file system layer[2].

[1] https://ceph.com/ceph-storage/object-storage/
[2] https://ceph.com/ceph-storage/file-system/

Edit: Keep in mind that Ceph configurations other than the ones included in Proxmox (VM storage, CephFS) will not receive enterprise support.

 

[Francesco Piraneo G.]

Hi Stefan,
thank you for your answer.

The Ceph cluster created can of course also be used for other tasks (although this is not supported by Proxmox tooling, and care has to be taken if one wants to use Ceph both as VM storage and for custom tasks).

Of course we use one ceph cluster only for customer tasks and another ceph cluster only for VMs; I hope is possible to have several clusters declared on one datacenter.

Edit: Keep in mind that Ceph configurations other than the ones included in Proxmox (VM storage, CephFS) will not receive enterprise support.

Thank you for the clarification; who we have to ask for enterprise support for ceph? RedHat maybe? I know they organize also trainings in RH France...

Francesco

 

[Alwin]

Of course we use one ceph cluster only for customer tasks and another ceph cluster only for VMs; I hope is possible to have several clusters declared on one datacenter.

No, Ceph in our stack is meant for VM/CT image (RBD) storing and Backups/ISOs/Templates (CephFS). And with that only one Ceph cluster can be defined with our interface.

Thank you for the clarification; who we have to ask for enterprise support for ceph? RedHat maybe? I know they organize also trainings in RH France...

To clarify what @Stefan_R said, we do have enterprise support for Ceph for our stack. But the stack for example does not include Ceph RGW or iSCSI gateway.

 

[Francesco Piraneo G.]

No, Ceph in our stack is meant for VM/CT image (RBD) storing and Backups/ISOs/Templates (CephFS).

Ok, so opposite to what said by @Stefan_R, no customer task can be performed on ceph cluster on your platform.
Is this correct?

To clarify what @Stefan_R said, we do have enterprise support for Ceph for our stack.

Sounds clear for me. But the question is another: The question is: Do you know who provide a qualified support on ceph?

 

[Alwin]

Ok, so opposite to what said by @Stefan_R, no customer task can be performed on ceph cluster on your platform.
Is this correct?

It is not correct.
Same message, just being more clear about what is covered and what not. It is unclear to me, what you mean by 'customer task'. As you, the customer could otherwise not use ceph if you couldn't do any task with it.

Sounds clear for me. But the question is another: The question is: Do you know who provide a qualified support on ceph?

What is your definition of 'qualified support'?
As said before, wo do give support just in combination with our stack, not as a general Ceph consultancy.