The software-defined nature of Ceph provides a great deal of flexibility to its adopters. Unlike other proprietary storage systems, which are hardware dependent, Ceph can be easily deployed and tested on almost any computer system available today. Moreover, if getting physical machines is a challenge, you can use virtual machines to install Ceph, as mentioned in this chapter, but keep in mind that such a setup should only be used for testing purposes.

In this chapter, we learned how to create a set of virtual machines using the VirtualBox software, followed by Ceph deployment as a three-node cluster using the ceph-deploy tool. We also added a couple of OSDs and monitor machines to our cluster in order to demonstrate its dynamic scalability. We recommend you deploy a Ceph cluster of your own using the instructions mentioned in this chapter. In the next chapter, we will discover Ceph's architecture, its core components, and how they interact with each other to form a cluster in detail.