Minimum hardware considerations

Before running IBM Storage Ceph, be sure to comply with all minimum hardware requirements listed here.

IBM Storage Ceph can run on non-proprietary commodity hardware. Small production clusters and development clusters can run without performance optimization with modest hardware.

Note: Disk space requirements are based on the Ceph daemons' default path under /var/lib/ceph/ directory.

For more information about the IBM Storage Ceph internal components and the strategies around those components, see Storage strategies.

Table 1. Containers
This table describes the process containers and their minimum recommended requirements for various components.
Process	Criteria	Minimum Recommended
`ceph-osd-container`	Processor	1x AMD64 or Intel 64 CPU CORE per OSD container
	RAM	Minimum of 5 GB of RAM per OSD container
	OS Disk	1x OS disk per host
	OSD Storage	1x storage drive per OSD container. Cannot be shared with OS Disk.
	`block.db`	Optional, but IBM recommended, 1x SSD or NVMe or Optane partition or lvm per daemon. Sizing is 4% of `block.data` for BlueStore for object, file, and mixed workloads and 1% of `block.data` for the BlueStore for Block Device, Openstack cinder, and Openstack cinder workloads.
	`block.wal`	Optionally, 1x SSD or NVMe or Optane partition or logical volume per daemon. Use a small size, for example 10 GB, and only if it’s faster than the `block.db` device.
	Network	2x 10 GB Ethernet NICs
`ceph-mon-container`	Processor	1x AMD64 or Intel 64 CPU CORE per mon-container
	RAM	3 GB per `mon-container`
	Disk Space	10 GB per `mon-container`, 50 GB Recommended
	Monitor Disk	Optionally, 1x SSD disk for `Monitor rocksdb` data
	Network	2x 1 GB Ethernet NICs, 10 GB Recommended
	Prometheus	20 GB to 50 GB under `/var/lib/ceph/` directory created as a separate file system to protect the contents under `/var/` directory.
`ceph-mgr-container`	Processor	1x AMD64 or Intel 64 CPU CORE per `mgr-container`
	RAM	3 GB per `mgr-container`
	Network	2x 1 GB Ethernet NICs, 10 GB Recommended
`ceph-radosgw-container`	Processor	1x AMD64 or Intel 64 CPU CORE per radosgw-container
	RAM	1 GB per daemon
	Disk Space	5 GB per daemon
	Network	1x 1 GB Ethernet NICs
`ceph-mds-container`	Processor	1x AMD64 or Intel 64 CPU CORE per mds-container
	RAM	3 GB per `mds-container` This number is highly dependent on the configurable MDS cache size. The RAM requirement is typically twice as much as the amount set in the `mds_cache_memory_limit` configuration setting. Note also that this is the memory for your daemon, not the overall system memory.
	Disk Space	2 GB per `mds-container`, plus considering any additional space required for possible debug logging, 20 GB is a good start.
	Network	2x 1 GB Ethernet NICs, 10 GB Recommended Note that this is the same network as the OSD containers. If you have a 10 GB network on your OSDs you should use the same on your MDS so that the MDS is not disadvantaged when it comes to latency.