Overview

The IBM Storage Ceph Plugin for vSphere allows management and control of storage volumes from within the VMware vSphere™ Client. The plug-in and associated workflow is integrated into the vSphere user interface. The interface allows for provisioning and management of VMFS datastores across multiple storage systems, all from within a single interface.

IBM Storage Ceph Plugin for vSphere is a VMware vCenter add-on that simplifies storage workflow for daily operations, such as:

Adding an IBM Storage Ceph NVMe-oF gateway.
Creating and attaching a new NVMe namespace.
Removing retired Ceph storage systems from vSphere clusters.

The plug-in supports all block storage devices within the IBM Storage Ceph 7.0 or later cluster.

The IBM Storage Ceph Plugin for vSphere is based on the VMware Remote plug-in architecture and is supported on VMware vSphere 7.0 and higher.

Note:

For a short introduction and demonstrative video, see IBM Storage Ceph now offers block storage for VMware on IBM MediaCenter (2:36).

Plug-in architecture

The plug-in architecture consists of two parts, which are delivered as a single OVF/OVA appliance:

VMware Photon OS - the underlying operating system of the appliance.
Note: Photon OS is a minimalist Linux operating system from VMware. For more information, see Introduction to Photon OS · VMware Photon OS 4.0 Documentation.
IBM Storage Ceph Plugin for vSphere application - a collection of scripts and Docker containers to facilitate integration into both vSphere and IBM Storage environments.