Cephalocon 2023

We are thrilled to present the results of the porting of Ceph RADOS, RBD and CephFS on Microsoft Windows, a community effort led by SUSE and Cloudbase Solutions. The goal consisted in porting librados and librdb on Windows Server, providing a kernel driver for exposing RBD devices natively as Windows volumes, support for Hyper-V VMs and last but not least, even CephFS. Through this work, Ceph becomes the most widely adopted cross platform Open Source distributed storage solution, allowing operators to deploy a cluster across heterogeneous operating systems and leveraging a unified distributed storage strategy on any commodity hardware. During this session we will talk about the architectural differences between Windows and Linux from a storage standpoint and how we retained the same CLI so that long time Ceph users will feel at home regardless of the underlying operating system. Performance is a key aspect of this porting, with Ceph on Windows significantly outperforming the iSCSI gateway, previously the main option for accessing RBD images from Windows nodes. There will be no lack of live demos, including automating the installation, setting up and managing a Ceph cluster across Windows and Linux nodes, spinning up Hyper-V VMs from RBD, CephFS and Failover Cluster / CSV.