Using external CEPH

[bartonf]

We're putting ProxMox VE through it's paces, and testing everything we can. we have an external ceph cluster that is working well, machines are running nicely (if slowly because it's all 7200 RPM spinning rust at this point)
My question is - can the ProxMox ceph gui manage this external ceph cluster? and even more than that - can it join the cluster?

Our initial test hosts don't have HBAs, so we couldn't put disks in the hosts, but as we move through equipment, and look to the future, we do have servers that will become PVE hosts that have HBAs, and so will end up putting some drives in them, and want to try to manage everything under as few "pains of glass" (misspelling very much intentional) as possible

Thanks!

 

[dherzig]

PVE will only manage the cluster set up by itself, if I understand things right (somebody correct me if I'm wrong). But it should be possible to rather easily adding the existing ceph cluster to the storage of your PVE cluster via 'Datacenter->Storage->Add' (or the shell way described here: [0] and here: [1]). There you can chose CephFS or RBD, depending on your needs and start using it from within PVE, which will act as a client then.

Once you created vm-disks and/or container volumes on the external cluster (satisfying results will mainly depend on the network speed), these could be moved through the standard vm->hardware, respectively container->resources settings.

[0] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#ceph_rados_block_devices
[1] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#storage_cephfs

 

[bartonf]

LIke I said, I have PVE is using the external ceph cluster no problems - it sounds like I would need to create a new ceph that is hosted on the PVE hosts.
The second question then is: can PVE add ceph nodes that are not PVE Hosts?

 

[czechsys]

LIke I said, I have PVE is using the external ceph cluster no problems - it sounds like I would need to create a new ceph that is hosted on the PVE hosts.
The second question then is: can PVE add ceph nodes that are not PVE Hosts?

No, PVE can add and manage only PVE nodes. There is no sense to combine internal and external ceph nodes in the one ceph cluster.

 

[bartonf]

Fair enough, thank you (this changes my overall engineering, but not in a crazy fashion)