About

The Ceph client tools and libraries can be natively used on Windows. This avoids the need of having additional layers such as iSCSI gateways or SMB shares, drastically improving the performance.

Building

At the moment, mingw gcc >= 8 is the only supported compiler for building ceph components for Windows. Support for msvc and clang will be added soon.

win32_build.sh can be used for cross compiling Ceph and its dependencies. It may be called from a Linux environment, including Windows Subsystem for Linux. MSYS2 and CygWin may also work but those weren't tested.

This script currently supports Ubuntu 20.04 and openSUSE Tumbleweed, but it may be easily adapted to run on other Linux distributions, taking into account different package managers, package names or paths (e.g. mingw paths).

The script accepts the following flags:

The following command will build the binaries and add them to a zip archive along with all the required DLLs. By default, the debug symbols are extracted from the binaries and placed in the ".debug" folder of the archive.

SKIP_TESTS=1 ./win32_build.sh

In order to disable a flag, such as CLEAN_BUILD, leave it undefined.

win32_build.sh will fetch dependencies using win32_deps_build.sh. If all dependencies are successfully prepared, this potentially time consuming step will be skipped by subsequent builds. Be aware that you may have to do a clean build (using the CLEAN_BUILD flag) when the dependencies change (e.g. after switching to a more recent Ceph version by doing a git pull).

Make sure to explicitly pass the "OS" parameter when directly calling win32_deps_build.sh. Also, be aware of the fact that it will use the distro specific package manager, which will require privileged rights.

Installing

MSI installer

Using the MSI installer is the recommended way of installing Ceph on Windows. Please check the installation guide for more details.

Manual installation

In order to manually install ceph, start by unzipping the binaries that you may have obtained by following the building step.

You may want to update the environment PATH variable, including the Ceph path. Assuming that you've copied the Ceph binaries to C:\Ceph, you may use the following Powershell command:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "$env:PATH;C:\ceph", "Machine")

In order to mount Ceph filesystems, you will have to install Dokany. You may fetch the installer as well as the source code from the Dokany Github repository: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/releases

The minimum supported Dokany version is 1.3.1. At the time of the writing, Dokany 2.0 is in Beta stage and is unsupported.

In order to map RBD images, the WNBD driver must be installed. Please check out this page for more details about WNBD and the install process: https://github.com/cloudbase/wnbd

The following command can be used to configure the ceph-rbd service. Please update the rbd-wnbd.exe path accordingly.

New-Service -Name "ceph-rbd" `
            -Description "Ceph RBD Mapping Service" `
            -BinaryPathName "c:\ceph\rbd-wnbd.exe service" `
            -StartupType Automatic

Further reading

• installation guide
• RBD Windows documentation
• Ceph Dokan documentation
• Windows troubleshooting