This book assumes medium-level knowledge of Linux operating systems and basic knowledge of storage technologies and networking. Although the book will go through a simple multi-node setup of a Ceph cluster, it is advisable that you have some prior experience of using Ceph. Although the book uses VirtualBox, feel free to use any other lab environment, such as VMware Workstation.

This book requires that you have enough resources to run the whole Ceph lab environment. The minimum hardware or virtual requirements are as follows:

• CPU: 2 cores
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Disk space: 40 GB

You will need the following software:

• VirtualBox
• Vagrant

Internet connectivity is required to install the packages that are part of the examples in each chapter.