Ceph Monitors

Ceph Monitors are lightweight processes that maintain a master copy of the storage cluster map. All Ceph clients contact a Ceph monitor and retrieve the current copy of the storage cluster map, enabling clients to bind to a pool and read and write data.

Ceph Monitors use a variation of the Paxos protocol to establish consensus about maps and other critical information across the storage cluster. Due to the nature of Paxos, Ceph requires a majority of monitors running to establish a quorum, thus establishing consensus.

IBM recommends deploying an odd number of monitors. An odd number of Ceph Monitors has a higher resilience to failures than an even number of monitors. For example, to maintain a quorum on a two-monitor deployment, Ceph cannot tolerate any failures; with three monitors, one failure; with four monitors, one failure; with five monitors, two failures. This is why an odd number is advisable. Summarizing, Ceph needs a majority of monitors to be running and to be able to communicate with each other, two out of three, three out of four, and so on.

For an initial deployment of a multi-node Ceph storage cluster, IBM requires three monitors, increasing the number two at a time if a valid need for more than three monitors exists.

Since Ceph Monitors are lightweight, it is possible to run them on the same host as OpenStack nodes. However, IBM recommends running monitors on separate hosts.

When you remove monitors from a storage cluster, consider that Ceph Monitors use the Paxos protocol to establish a consensus about the master storage cluster map. You must have a sufficient number of Ceph Monitors to establish a quorum.