---
title: Quick Start
weight: 1
---

Prepare:

- Get some SATA or NVMe SSDs with capacitors (server-grade drives). You can use desktop SSDs
  with lazy fsync, but prepare for inferior single-thread latency. Read more about capacitors
  [here]({{< ref "config/layout-cluster#immediate_commit" >}}).
- Get a fast network (at least 10 Gbit/s). Something like Mellanox ConnectX-4 with RoCEv2 is ideal.
- Disable CPU powersaving: `cpupower idle-set -D 0 && cpupower frequency-set -g performance`.
- [Install Vitastor packages]({{< ref "installation/packages" >}}).

## Configure monitors

On the monitor hosts:
- Edit variables at the top of `/usr/lib/vitastor/mon/make-units.sh` to desired values.
- Create systemd units for the monitor and etcd: `/usr/lib/vitastor/mon/make-units.sh`
- Start etcd and monitors: `systemctl start etcd vitastor-mon`

## Configure OSDs

- Put etcd_address and osd_network into `/etc/vitastor/vitastor.conf`. Example:
  ```
  {
    "etcd_address": ["10.200.1.10:2379","10.200.1.11:2379","10.200.1.12:2379"],
    "osd_network": "10.200.1.0/24"
  }
  ```
- Initialize OSDs:
  - Simplest, SSD-only: `/usr/lib/vitastor/mon/make-osd.sh /dev/disk/by-partuuid/XXX [/dev/disk/by-partuuid/YYY ...]`
  - Hybrid, HDD+SSD: `/usr/lib/vitastor/mon/make-osd-hybrid.js /dev/sda /dev/sdb ...` &mdash; pass all your
    devices (HDD and SSD) to this script &mdash; it will partition disks and initialize journals on its own.
    This script skips HDDs which are already partitioned so if you want to use non-empty disks for
    Vitastor you should first wipe them with `wipefs -a`. SSDs with GPT partition table are not skipped,
    but some free unpartitioned space must be available because the script creates new partitions for journals.
- You can change OSD configuration in units or in `vitastor.conf`.
  Check [Configuration Reference]({{< ref "config" >}}) for parameter descriptions.
- `systemctl start vitastor.target` everywhere.
- If all your drives have capacitors, create global configuration in etcd: \
  `etcdctl --endpoints=... put /vitastor/config/global '{"immediate_commit":"all"}'`

## Create a pool

Create pool configuration in etcd:

```
etcdctl --endpoints=... put /vitastor/config/pools '{"1":{"name":"testpool",
  "scheme":"replicated","pg_size":2,"pg_minsize":1,"pg_count":256,"failure_domain":"host"}}'
```

For jerasure pools the configuration should look like the following:

```
etcdctl --endpoints=... put /vitastor/config/pools '{"2":{"name":"ecpool",
  "scheme":"jerasure","pg_size":4,"parity_chunks":2,"pg_minsize":2,"pg_count":256,"failure_domain":"host"}`
```

After you do this, one of the monitors will configure PGs and OSDs will start them.

You can check PG states with `etcdctl --endpoints=... get --prefix /vitastor/pg/state`. All PGs should become 'active'.

## Create an image

Use vitastor-cli ([read CLI documentation here]({{< ref "usage/cli" >}})):

```
vitastor-cli create -s 10G testimg
```

After that, you can run benchmarks or start QEMU manually with this image.