OS Recommendations

Ceph Dependencies

As a general rule, we recommend deploying Ceph on newer releases of Linux. We also recommend deploying on releases with long-term support.

Linux Kernel

Ceph Kernel Client

If you are using the kernel client to map RBD block devices or mount CephFS, the general advice is to use a “stable” or “longterm maintenance” kernel series provided by either http://kernel.org or your Linux distribution on any client hosts.

For RBD, if you choose to track long-term kernels, we recommend at least 4.19-based “longterm maintenance” kernel series. If you can use a newer “stable” or “longterm maintenance” kernel series, do it.

For CephFS, see the section about Mounting CephFS using Kernel Driver for kernel version guidance.

Older kernel client versions may not support your CRUSH tunables profile or other newer features of the Ceph cluster, requiring the storage cluster to be configured with those features disabled. For RBD, a kernel of version 5.3 or CentOS 8.2 is the minimum necessary for reasonable support for RBD image features.
Ceph MS Windows Client

Ceph’s MS Windows native client support is “best effort”. There is no full-time maintainer. As of July 2025 there are no plans to remove this client but the future is uncertain.

Platforms

The chart below shows the platforms for which Ceph provides packages, and the platforms on which Ceph has been tested.

Ceph does not require a specific Linux distribution. Ceph can run on any distribution that includes a supported kernel and supported system startup framework, for example sysvinit or systemd. Ceph is sometimes ported to non-Linux systems but these are not supported by the core Ceph effort.

	Tentacle (20.2.z)	Squid (19.2.z)	Reef (18.2.z)
CentOS 9	A	A	A
Debian 12	C	C	C
Ubuntu 20.04			A
Ubuntu 22.04	A	A	A
MS Windows	D	D	D

A: Ceph provides packages and has done comprehensive tests on the software in them.
B: Ceph provides packages and has done basic tests on the software in them.
C: Ceph provides packages only. No tests have been done on these releases.
D: Client packages are available from an external site but are not maintained or tested by the core Ceph team.

Container Hosts

This table shows the operating systems that support Ceph’s official container images.

	Tentacle (20.2.z)	Squid (19.2.z)	Reef (18.2.z)
CentOS 9	H	H	H
Ubuntu 22.04	H	H	H

H: Ceph tests this distribution as a container host.

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