Ceph Cookbook.

This book relies heavily on vagrant, virtualbox, ansible, and ceph-ansible to get your environment up quickly but this just doesn't work in 2021. If you use a modern linux distro you will need to sign the virtualbox kernel modules and if you use secure boot you will need to enroll mok in eufi every time the kernel is replaced/upgraded. While vagrant might work with libvirt they recommend running it in a docker image, and even if you were to get that set up I am unsure if you could use the same "box" image and vagrantfiles that the book provides. The version of vagrantfiles conflicts with the version of virtualbox that you can get and even when you get those lined up it seems the current version of ansible works with the ceph-ansible that the book's publisher provides in their repo.Even if you get the vagrant, virtualbox, ansible, and ceph-ansible lined up and everything works, you will be learning an out-dated version of Ceph using deployment techniques that Ceph does not use in their official documentation.Because of the above, I cannot recommend this book for learning Ceph in 2021. That said, if you need historical context, or if you already have a v14 cluster up and running, this might be a good reference for you. The structure of the book is easy to understand and consistent, it seems to cover a lot of topics with practical examples of how to do common tasks... but then again you might just want to pull up the official ceph documentation on your release, it might be just as helpful.

This book has some seemingly great exercises to help you learn Ceph. The problem is that the book is stuck in 2017, and the CentOS VMs used end up being too new once yum is used to install updates (as the exercises ask you to do). So instead time is wasted trying to fix issues because Ansible ends up being too new (you have to enable CentOS-Vault, manually install 2.3.2) and the config language changed, or there are connectivity issues that I can't figure out (been doing IT/dev for ~15 years). Instead, just learn what you can from the ceph-ansible project on Github. The book costing what it does is robbery at this point.

What is OK :- A lot of good content with useful recipesWhat I did not like- the advertising for CEPH based on debatable statements- not enough explanations for the why or meaning of the stepsin the recipes- not (clear) enough explanations of the CEPH concepts (backfill, tunables, ...)Bottom line : You have to know a lot on CEPH otherwise you are lost, so not a book for a beginner in CEPH storage