How to Deploy a Proxmox Ceph Cluster for High-Availability Storage

Deploying a hyper-converged Proxmox cluster integrated with Ceph storage enhances your infrastructure’s scalability, reliability, and performance. This guide walks you through setting up such a cluster, ensuring a robust virtualization environment with efficient storage management.

Looking to understand Proxmox clustering first? Here is our guide on setting up a Proxmox Cluster.

Why Combine Proxmox with Ceph?

Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is an open-source platform for enterprise virtualization, combining KVM hypervisor and LXC containers. Integrating Ceph, a distributed storage system, provides:

• Scalability: Easily expand storage by adding new nodes.
• High Availability: Data replication across nodes ensures redundancy.
• Performance: Efficient data distribution optimizes read/write operations.

Prerequisites

Before starting, ensure you have:

1. Hardware:
   • CPU: Adequate cores; OSD services benefit from higher frequencies and multiple cores.
   • Memory: Sufficient RAM; consider both VM/container needs and Ceph’s requirements.
   • Storage: Dedicated disks for Ceph OSDs; uniform disk sizes are recommended.
   • Network: Reliable networking; separate networks for public and cluster traffic enhance performance.
2. Software:
   • Proxmox VE installed on all nodes.

Step 1: Set Up the Proxmox Cluster

1. Create Cluster on First Node:
   • Navigate to Datacenter > Cluster in the Proxmox web interface.
   • Click Create Cluster, provide a Cluster Name, and specify the Cluster Network.
   • Click Create.
2. Join Additional Nodes:
   • On each additional node, navigate to Datacenter > Cluster.
   • Click Join Cluster, enter the Cluster Join Information from the first node, and click Join.

Step 2: Install Ceph on All Nodes

1. Access the First Node:
   • Navigate to Ceph in the Proxmox web interface.
   • Click Install Ceph, select the desired Ceph version and subscription, and start the installation.
2. Configure Networks:
   • Define the Public Network and Cluster Network under Configuration.
   • Select Y at the Setup Installation prompt if everything looks correct.
   • Configure IP subnet
3. Repeat on Remaining Nodes.

Step 3: Configure Ceph OSDs

1. Prepare Disks:
   • Navigate to Disks to verify disk availability.
2. Create OSDs:
   • On each node, go to Ceph > OSD, click Create OSD, select the disk, and click Create.

Step 4: Create Ceph Pools

• • Navigate to Pools:
    • Go to Ceph > Pools, click Create Pool.
  • Configure Pool:
    • Name the pool (e.g., vm_storage).
    • Set the Size (number of replicas; typically 3) and click Create.

Step 5: Set Up Ceph Monitors and Managers

1. Add Monitors:
   • Navigate to Ceph > Monitor and click Create Monitor.
   • Add to all existing nodes.

Testing Live Migrations In Your Proxmox Ceph Environment

Once your Proxmox Ceph cluster is set up with three monitor nodes and integrated storage, you’ll have a distributed shared storage system across all hosts. This enables seamless live migration of virtual machines between nodes with minimal downtime, transferring only the memory map rather than entire disk images. 

The cluster ensures high availability and fault tolerance, maintaining operations if a node fails, while pooling storage resources for efficient use. You’ll also benefit from simplified management through the Proxmox interface, supporting resilient, scalable virtualization—ideal for testing or small-scale deployments, even in nested environments.

Common Proxmox Ceph Cluster Troubleshooting Issues & Fixes

Setting up a hyper-converged Proxmox Ceph Cluster provides a scalable, high-availability infrastructure suitable for enterprise workloads. 

If you’re considering managed private cloud solutions, HorizonIQ provides tailored infrastructure expertise. Contact us today to learn more.

Tony Joy

Tony has spent the past 15 years in the managed hosting space, building, supporting, and designing implementations ranging from bare metal fleets to multi-platform cloud environments. He specializes in guiding customers through complex deployments, optimizing integrations, and ensuring smooth transitions to new platforms.

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