Earlier in this chapter, we discussed some traits of selecting the right hardware depending on your needs and use case. You should make the necessary arrangements for your cluster hardware including networking components. The cluster hardware should be mounted, cabled, powered on, and should have valid networking between its nodes. Once you are ready with the hardware, the next task is to perform software arrangements for your cluster.
Ceph is a software-defined storage system, which runs on top of a Linux-based operating system. All the cluster nodes should be installed with Ceph-supported operating system. As of now, the valid operating system choice for running a Ceph cluster is RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and OpenSuse. You can check out more information for supported platforms on http://ceph.com/docs/master/start/os-recommendations/.
Ceph is an open source project; there are several ways to get its software from the Internet.
Getting packages over the Internet is one of the most used options for getting Ceph. There are again two different ways to get these packages:
- The first method is manually downloading Ceph and its related packages in the desired format. This would be a feasible option for you if due to security reasons, you do not have Internet access to your Ceph nodes. You can download Ceph and its dependencies on any of the machines in your network and copy them to each node and proceed with the Ceph installation.
You can visit
http://ceph.com/rpm-<ceph-release-name>for RPM-based packages andhttp://ceph.com/debian-<ceph-release-name>for Debian-based packages. The valid Ceph release names are Argonaut, Bobtail, Cuttlefish, Dumpling, Emperor, Firefly, and Giant.In addition to this, you will also require third-party libraries, which needs to be installed before Ceph packages. You can check out the list of additional binaries on Ceph documentation at http://ceph.com/docs/master/install/get-packages/#download-packages.
- The second method is using package management tools by adding Ceph package repositories to either Advanced Package Tool (APT) for Debian-based Linux distributions or Yellowdog Updater Modifier (YUM) for RHEL-based Linux distributions. For RPM packages, you should create a new repository file as
/etc/yum.repos.d/ceph.repo. Add the following code in this file; replace{ceph-release}with valid Ceph release names and{distro}with Linux distribution such as el6 and rhel6. For more information on getting Ceph packages, check out http://ceph.com/docs/master/install/get-packages/.[ceph] name=Ceph packages for $basearch baseurl=http://ceph.com/rpm-{ceph-release}/{distro}/$basearch enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 type=rpm-md gpgkey=https://ceph.com/git/?p=ceph.git;a=blob_plain;f=keys/release.asc [ceph-noarch] name=Ceph noarch packages baseurl=http://ceph.com/rpm-{ceph-release}/{distro}/noarch enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 type=rpm-md gpgkey=https://ceph.com/git/?p=ceph.git;a=blob_plain;f=keys/release.asc [ceph-source] name=Ceph source packages baseurl=http://ceph.com/rpm-{ceph-release}/{distro}/SRPMS enabled=0 gpgcheck=1 type=rpm-md gpgkey=https://ceph.com/git/?p=ceph.git;a=blob_plain;f=keys/release.asc
You can download Ceph source code from http://ceph.com/download/ and can compile and build a Ceph version from source.
You can clone Ceph master branch source code from the online GitHub Ceph repository. To do this, you will require Git toolkit installed on your local machine. If you are a developer, this will be quite helpful for you to build Ceph and contribute to the open source project. If you need the latest development version of Ceph or a bug fix for a stable release, you can clone and build specific bug fixes before they are released officially.