OS Recommendations

Ceph Dependencies

As a general rule, we recommend deploying Ceph on newer releases of Linux. We also recommend deploying on releases with long-term support.

Linux Kernel

  • Ceph Kernel Client

    If you are using the kernel client to map RBD block devices or mount CephFS, the general advice is to use a “stable” or “longterm maintenance” kernel series provided by either http://kernel.org or your Linux distribution on any client hosts.

    For RBD, if you choose to track long-term kernels, we recommend at least 4.19-based “longterm maintenance” kernel series. If you can use a newer “stable” or “longterm maintenance” kernel series, do it.

    For CephFS, see the section about Mounting CephFS using Kernel Driver for kernel version guidance.

    Older kernel client versions may not support your CRUSH tunables profile or other newer features of the Ceph cluster, requiring the storage cluster to be configured with those features disabled. For RBD, a kernel of version 5.3 or CentOS 8.2 is the minimum necessary for reasonable support for RBD image features.

Platforms

The charts below show how Ceph’s requirements map onto various Linux platforms. Generally speaking, there is very little dependence on specific distributions outside of the kernel and system initialization package (i.e., sysvinit, systemd).

Release Name

Tag

CentOS

Ubuntu

OpenSUSE C

Debian C

Quincy

17.2.z

8 A

20.04 A

15.3

11

Pacific

16.2.z

8 A

18.04 C, 20.04 A

15.2

10, 11

Octopus

15.2.z

7 B 8 A

18.04 C, 20.04 A

15.2

10

  • A: Ceph provides packages and has done comprehensive tests on the software in them.

  • B: Ceph provides packages and has done basic tests on the software in them.

  • C: Ceph provides packages only. No tests have been done on these releases.

Ceph does not require a specific Linux distribution. Ceph can run on any distribution that includes a supported kernel and supported system startup framework, for example sysvinit or systemd. Ceph is sometimes ported to non-Linux systems but these are not supported by the core Ceph effort.

Note

For Centos 7 Users

Btrfs is no longer tested on Centos 7 in the Octopus release. We recommend using bluestore instead.