Rook turns Ceph into a Kubernetes-native workload: it deploys and reconciles monitors, OSDs, and managers as pods, exposes block, filesystem, and object storage through a handful of CRDs, and handles day-2 operations — scaling, upgrades, failure recovery — through the operator loop. This post covers the full architecture, the key CRDs with YAML, StorageClass patterns for RBD and CephFS, external-cluster mode, and an honest verdict on when Rook-Ceph is the right tool versus when Longhorn or cloud-native block storage is the better answer.
Ceph
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Rook: Ceph as a Kubernetes Operator -
Ceph as Software-Defined Storage: Block, File, and Object Across Every Platform What software-defined storage really means, why Ceph is the reference implementation, and how to actually consume it — RBD block, CephFS file, and RGW object — from Linux, macOS, and Windows, plus deep Proxmox integration and the networking that holds it all together.
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Proxmox VE in Production Building and running a Proxmox VE cluster in production: storage backends (ZFS, Ceph, NFS), VM and LXC management, live migration, high availability with fencing, PCIe passthrough, and backup with Proxmox Backup Server.
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Standalone Ceph Without Proxmox: cephadm, Pool Design, and Day-2 Operations Running Ceph on plain Linux without Proxmox hiding the complexity — bootstrapping with cephadm, designing pools and CRUSH rules for your hardware, exposing RBD, CephFS, and RGW, and the day-2 operations that keep a cluster healthy.
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Proxmox + Ceph: Hyperconverged Storage Deep Dive A complete guide to building hyperconverged storage with Proxmox VE and Ceph: OSD placement, CRUSH maps, erasure coding, pool configuration, SSD vs HDD tuning, and building a production-grade cluster.
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NFS and Network Storage: A Complete Guide from Homelab to the Cloud An exhaustive guide to network storage — NFSv3 vs NFSv4, Samba/SMB, iSCSI block storage, Lustre parallel filesystems, and Ceph, plus how all of these map to homelab deployments and cloud equivalents on Azure, AWS, and GCP.