Once you have planned your Ceph project and are ready to either deploy 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 the reasons 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, you will learn about the following topics:

• Preparing a testing environment with Vagrant and VirtualBox
• Learning about the differences between ceph-deploy and orchestration tools
• The advantages of using orchestration tools
• Installing and using Ansible
• Configuring the Ceph Ansible modules
• Deploying a test cluster with Vagrant and Ansible
• Ideas around how to manage your Ceph configuration