While running Ceph in a VM may not be considered the most efficient mode of operation, it's still fairly popular. I've put together a small project that can spin up an OSD VM in just a few minutes. Whereas Ceph given free rein will gladly acquire resources with all the enthusiasm as a sprig of mint in damp earth, what I've developed is more useful for a small farm with very irregular resources such as my own. And for research purposes! The project has 2 components: one of which gets deployed on the intended VM host, the other being an Ansible role and model playbook. Full instructions are provided. And incidentally, the Ansible role should be able to run against a base OS host, even though it was developed for VMs. Comments and suggestions welcome. https://gogs.mousetech.com/mtsinc7/instant_osd