Although not strictly part of BlueStore, the ceph-volume tool was released around the same time as BlueStore and is the recommended tool for provisioning Bluestore OSDs. It's a direct replacement for the ceph-disk tool, which had a number of issues surrounding race conditions and the predictability of OSDs being correctly enumerated and starting up. The ceph-disk tool used udev to identify OSDs that were then mounted and activated. The ceph-disk tool has now been deprecated, and all new OSDs should be created using ceph-volume.

Although ceph-volume can function in a simple mode, the recommended approach is to use the lvm mode. As the name suggests, this utilizes the Linux logical volume manager to store information regarding the OSDs and to manage the block devices. Additionally, the dm-cache, which is a part of lvm, can be used to provide block-level caching underneath the OSDs.

The ceph-volume tool also has a batch mode, which aims to intelligently provision OSDs given a list of block devices. Care should be taken to use the --report mode to ensure that its intended action matches your expectations. Otherwise, it's recommended that you manually partition and create OSDs.