Scaling down your Ceph cluster

One of the most important features of a storage system is its flexibility. A good storage solution should be flexible enough to support its expansion and reduction without causing any downtime to the services. Traditional storage systems have limited flexibility; the expansion and reduction of such systems is a tough job. Sometimes, you feel locked with storage capacity and that you cannot perform changes as per your needs.

Ceph is an absolutely flexible storage system that supports on-the-fly changes to storage capacity, whether expansion or reduction. In the last recipe, we learned how easy it is to scale out a Ceph cluster. In this recipe, we will scale down a Ceph cluster, without any impact on data accessibility, by removing ceph-node4 from the Ceph cluster.

How to do it...

Since removing an OSD node is not currently supported in ceph-ansible, let's follow the next set of steps to do this manually.

Removing the Ceph OSD

Before proceeding with the cluster size...