Hi Francesco,

We used to manage our Ceph cluster with a Puppet -like tool and decided to switch to cephadm to do the cluster manager in Octopus, using our system management tool only to provision the OS and Podman and configure the SSH key required by cephadm. It has been a huge improving terms of management efficiency, in particular the time required by any Ceph upgrade operation, including OS upgrades/réinstallation where cephadm redeploys everything required automatically.

We will never move back to previous way of managing our cluster!

Thank you,

this might be a solution too (using other tools to setup the OS and then 

switch to cephadm)

It's not only about familiarity, I was also thinking about feasibility 

in the long run, with upgrades, new nodes etc, so nice to know that CEPH 

and OpenStack managements can be decoupled

Best regards

-- 

Francesco Di Nucci

System Administrator

Compute & Networking Service, INFN Naples

Email: francesco.dinucci@na.infn.it

On 20/05/25 09:12, Eugen Block wrote:

Hi,

I would say this is opinion based and depends on your experience and 

infrastructure.

Even if you decided to use cephadm as a Ceph deployment tool, you 

still need to have some installation and configuration management in 

place, at least if you have more than a few hosts. Because with the 

Ceph orchestrator (cephadm) you can only add hosts that have been 

configured to your needs, like ssh keys, podman/docker, chrony etc. If 

you use puppet for that, it might be the right choice for you.

We are using a combination of cobbler and Salt (Uyuni project) to 

perform automatic OS installation via PXE boot and configuration via 

Salt. Once the systems are ready to join the Ceph cluster, we just add 

them via orchestrator (ceph orch host add ...) and then the rest is 

managed by cephadm. So in our case, Ceph is decoupled from OpenStack 

management, although the OpenStack hosts are also installed and 

configured via Salt.

I'd say choose the method you're most familiar with.

Regards,

Eugen

Zitat von Francesco Di Nucci <francesco.dinucci@na.infn.it>:

Thank you,

I'd read it, but as there also are other methods such as ceph-ansible 

and puppet-ceph I am trying to get a feedback from other operators 

about their experiences, as in this case I'm particularly interested 

in integration of CEPH with OpenStack

Best regards

-- 

Francesco Di Nucci

System Administrator

Compute & Networking Service, INFN Naples

Email:francesco.dinucci@na.infn.it

On 19/05/25 16:29, Maksim Malchuk wrote:

Hi Francesco,

The CEPH community recommends using CEPHADM as the primary tool for 

deploying CEPH: 

https://docs.ceph.com/en/latest/install/#recommended-methods

On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 4:19 PM Francesco Di Nucci 

<francesco.dinucci@na.infn.it> wrote:

   Hi all,

   we're planning (finally) to setup a CEPH cluster to be used as

   OpenStack

   backend.

   The cloud is actually set up with Foreman+Puppet, to setup CEPH what

   would you advice?

   cephadm as it's the preferred method in the CEPH docs or Puppet

   with the

   puppet-ceph module, as it's part of openstack?

   Thanks in advance

   --     Francesco Di Nucci

   System Administrator

   Compute & Networking Service, INFN Naples

   Email: francesco.dinucci@na.infn.it

-- 

Regards,

Maksim Malchuk