Installing Ceph on Windows
The Ceph client tools and libraries can be natively used on Windows. This avoids the need of having additional layers such as iSCSI gateways or SMB shares, drastically improving the performance.
Prerequisites
Supported platforms
Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2016 are supported. Previous Windows Server versions, including Windows client versions such as Windows 10, might work but haven’t been tested.
Windows Server 2016 does not provide Unix sockets, in which case some commands might be unavailable.
Secure boot
The WNBD driver hasn’t been signed by Microsoft, which means that Secure Boot
must be disabled.
Dokany
In order to mount Ceph filesystems, ceph-dokan requires Dokany to be
installed. You may fetch the installer as well as the source code from the
Dokany Github repository: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/releases
The minimum supported Dokany version is 1.3.1. At the time of the writing, Dokany 2.0 is in Beta stage and is unsupported.
Unlike WNBD, Dokany isn’t included in the Ceph MSI installer.
MSI installer
Using the MSI installer is the recommended way of installing Ceph on Windows. It can be downloaded from here: https://cloudbase.it/ceph-for-windows/
As mentioned earlier, the Ceph installer does not include Dokany, which has to be installed separately.
A server reboot is required after uninstalling the driver, otherwise subsequent install attempts may fail.
The following project allows building the MSI installer: https://github.com/cloudbase/ceph-windows-installer. It can either use prebuilt Ceph and WNBD binaries or compile them from scratch.
Manual installation
The following document describes the build process and manual installation: https://github.com/ceph/ceph/blob/master/README.windows.rst
Configuration
Please check the Windows configuration sample to get started.
You’ll also need a keyring file. The General CephFS Prerequisites page provides a simple example, showing how a new CephX user can be created and how its secret key can be retrieved.
For more details on CephX user management, see the Client Authentication and User Management.