Ceph is one of the most exciting new technologies to recently emerge in the Linux storage space. Based on the RADOS object store, the Ceph stack boasts massive scalability and high availability using nothing but commercial, off-the shelf hardware and free and open source software.

Ceph includes a massively distributed filesystem (Ceph FS), a striped, replicated, highly available block device (RADOS block device, RBD), S3 and Swift object storage capability through the RESTful RADOS Gateway, and a simple, well-documented native API with language bindings for C, C++ and Python. The Ceph filesystem and RBD have been part of the mainline kernel since the 2.6.3x releases, and the server-side stack has recently undergone an extensive cleanup and stabilization phase.

The Ceph stack is also well integrated into OpenStack, making it a potential "one-stop shop" for OpenStack object, image and volume storage.

In this hands-on tutorial, Florian and Tim will walk you through the initial setup of a Ceph cluster, explore its capabilities, highlight its most important features and identify current shortcomings, discuss performance considerations, and identify common Ceph failure modes and troubleshooting steps.

Attendees should have a good understanding of Linux systems administration. Prior experience with distributed storage (like Lustre, GlusterFS, DRBD, Swift) is a plus but not required. Prior knowledge of the Ceph stack is not necessary. Attendees will have the opportunity to follow the tutorial in a virtual Ceph cluster of their own; pre-installed Libvirt/KVM virtual images will be available for that purpose.

Co-presenter: Tim Serong, SUSE