I am currently exploring the possibility of deploying a Ceph cluster to meet our storage needs for the business that I work in and so to get a better understanding of how it all works, I thought it would be a good idea to have a first hand play with it.
Rather than buying all of the required hardware, a quick and cost effective option is to spin up an image on Amazon AWS and have a play. After looking at the AWS EC2 image types available I found that a d2.xlarge if probably close to the hardware that I would be using for the real cluster. It has 4 cores, 30 GB of memory and 3x 2TB HDDs. Best of all it costs around $1 / hr. This seems to be an affordable way to quickly test an idea. So I spun up an EC2 instance with CentOS 7 confirmed that I can ssh into it.
$ ssh -i ceph-test.pem centos@ec2–13–211–212–103.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com[centos@ip-172-31-28-245 ~]$ ls -la /dev
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 202, 0 May 3 04:46 xvda
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 202, 1 May 3 04:46 xvda1
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 202, 16 May 3 04:46 xvdb
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 202, 32 May 3 04:46 xvdc
brw-rw----. 1 root disk 202, 48 May 3 04:46 xvdd
So it looks like we have a machine provisioned with 4 disks, xvda is the boot disk and xvdb, xvdc and xvdd are our 3 attached 2 TB HDDs.
