Deploying a Rook‑Ceph Cluster on Kubernetes with Operator, Toolbox and Dashboard

Rook is an open‑source cloud‑native storage orchestration tool that turns storage software into self‑managing, self‑scaling, and self‑healing services by leveraging Kubernetes capabilities.

The example environment uses Kubernetes v1.16.2, Docker 18.09.9, and Rook release‑1.1.

Deploy Rook Operator

Apply the Rook manifests for the selected release:

$ kubectl apply -f common.yaml
$ kubectl apply -f operator.yaml

Verify the rook-ceph-operator pod is in the Running state:

$ kubectl get pod -n rook-ceph

Create CephCluster

Prepare a cluster.yaml file (excerpt):

apiVersion: ceph.rook.io/v1
kind: CephCluster
metadata:
  name: rook-ceph
  namespace: rook-ceph
spec:
  cephVersion:
    image: ceph/ceph:v14.2.4-20190917
  dataDirHostPath: /data/rook
  mon:
    count: 3
  dashboard:
    enabled: true
  storage:
    useAllNodes: true
    useAllDevices: false
    directories:
    - path: /var/lib/rook

Create the cluster:

$ kubectl apply -f cluster.yaml

Check the pods in the rook-ceph namespace; all should show Running status, confirming a healthy Ceph deployment.

Rook Toolbox

Deploy the toolbox for debugging and testing:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: rook-ceph-tools
  namespace: rook-ceph
  labels:
    app: rook-ceph-tools
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: rook-ceph-tools
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: rook-ceph-tools
    spec:
      dnsPolicy: ClusterFirstWithHostNet
      hostNetwork: true
      containers:
      - name: rook-ceph-tools
        image: rook/ceph:v1.1.0
        command: ["/tini"]
        args: ["-g", "--", "/usr/local/bin/toolbox.sh"]
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        env:
        - name: ROOK_ADMIN_SECRET
          valueFrom:
            secretKeyRef:
              name: rook-ceph-mon
              key: admin-secret
        securityContext:
          privileged: true
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /dev
          name: dev
        - mountPath: /sys/bus
          name: sysbus
        - mountPath: /lib/modules
          name: libmodules
        - mountPath: /etc/rook
          name: mon-endpoint-volume
      volumes:
      - name: dev
        hostPath:
          path: /dev
      - name: sysbus
        hostPath:
          path: /sys/bus
      - name: libmodules
        hostPath:
          path: /lib/modules
      - name: mon-endpoint-volume
        configMap:
          name: rook-ceph-mon-endpoints
          items:
          - key: data
            path: mon-endpoints

Apply the toolbox deployment:

$ kubectl apply -f toolbox.yaml

Enter the toolbox pod to run Ceph commands such as ceph status , ceph osd status , ceph df , and rados df for health checks.

Ceph Dashboard

Enable the dashboard by setting dashboard.enable=true in the CephCluster spec. The operator creates a rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard service on port 7000.

To expose the dashboard outside the cluster, create a NodePort service:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: rook-ceph-mgr-dashboard-external
  namespace: rook-ceph
  labels:
    app: rook-ceph-mgr
    rook_cluster: rook-ceph
spec:
  ports:
  - name: dashboard
    port: 7000
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 7000
  selector:
    app: rook-ceph-mgr
    rook_cluster: rook-ceph
  type: NodePort

Apply the service and note the allocated node port (e.g., 32381):

$ kubectl apply -f dashboard-external.yaml
$ kubectl get service -n rook-ceph

Access the dashboard at http://<NodeIP>:32381 . The default admin user is admin ; retrieve the password with:

$ kubectl -n rook-ceph get secret rook-ceph-dashboard-password -o jsonpath="{['data']['password']}" | base64 --decode && echo

Dashboard Configuration

The CephCluster CRD allows customizing the dashboard URL prefix, port, and SSL settings:

spec:
  dashboard:
    urlPrefix: /ceph-dashboard
    port: 8443
    ssl: true

Monitoring

Rook ships built‑in Prometheus exporters. Follow the official monitoring guide to scrape metrics from the Rook cluster.

Overall, this guide provides a complete, step‑by‑step procedure to deploy a production‑ready Rook‑Ceph storage solution on a Kubernetes cluster, including operator installation, cluster creation, toolbox usage, dashboard exposure, and monitoring configuration.