Planning your storage needs is extremely important for your Ceph cluster. The planning phase is something that defines your Ceph clusters capacity, performance, and fault tolerance level. You know your requirements, storage needs, and workload better than anyone else does; so, you should decide your own Ceph hardware and software configuration, keeping your needs in mind. From the deployment context, Ceph provides both the manual and automated ways of deployment. The manual deployment procedure is mostly used by configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, and Chef.

The manual deployment process helps these tools to implement a number of checks during deployment, thus improving flexibility. The automated deployment method is to use ceph-deploy tool, which is relatively simple and provides easy-to-use command sets for various cluster-related activities. The Ceph storage cluster can scale up on the fly; also, upgradation from one release to another is extremely simple with no services getting impacted.