Once you have planned your Ceph project and are ready to deploy either a test or production cluster, you will need to consider the method you wish to use to both deploy and maintain it. This chapter will demonstrate how to quickly deploy test environments for testing and development by the use of Vagrant. It will also explain why you might want to consider using an orchestration tool to deploy Ceph rather than using the supplied Ceph tools. As a popular orchestration tool, Ansible will be used to show how quickly and reliably a Ceph cluster can be deployed and the advantages that using it can bring.

In this chapter, we will learn the following:

• How to prepare a testing environment with Vagrant and VirtualBox
• The differences between Ceph's deploy and orchestration tools
• The advantages over using orchestration tools
• How to install and use Ansible
• How to configure Ceph Ansible modules
• How to deploy a test cluster with Vagrant and Ansible
• Ideas concerning how to manage your Ceph configuration
• What the Rook project is and what it enables a Ceph operator to do
• How to deploy a basic Kubernetes cluster
• How to use Rook to deploy Ceph on Kubernetes