In Ceph, when you create an OSD (Object Storage Device) you also need to create its Journal, which is where data is initially written before it is flushed to an OSD. Note that too maximize I/O it is suggested to use SSD drives as the journal partitions for your OSDs (see this link for reference).

So this is exactly what I did. I basically followed the instructions here regarding the creation of OSDs and Journals.

However post-deployment, I wanted to verify that my journal partitions were actually created properly and were being used as expected. That was a little bit tougher to figure out.

First you need to ssh directly to one of your OSD Servers, this command cannot be run from the monitor/admin node.

[root@osd01 ceph-20]# ceph-disk list
WARNING:ceph-disk:Old blkid does not support ID_PART_ENTRY_* fields, trying sgdisk; may not correctly identify ceph volumes with dmcrypt
/dev/sda :
/dev/sda1 other, xfs, mounted on /boot
/dev/sda2 other, LVM2_member
/dev/sdb :
/dev/sdb1 ceph data, active, unknown cluster 6f7cebf2-ceef-49b1-8928-2d36e6044db4, osd.19, journal /dev/sde1
/dev/sdc :
/dev/sdc1 ceph data, active, unknown cluster 6f7cebf2-ceef-49b1-8928-2d36e6044db4, osd.20, journal /dev/sde2
/dev/sdd :
/dev/sdd1 ceph data, active, unknown cluster 6f7cebf2-ceef-49b1-8928-2d36e6044db4, osd.21, journal /dev/sde3
/dev/sde :
/dev/sde1 ceph journal, for /dev/sdb1
/dev/sde2 ceph journal, for /dev/sdc1
/dev/sde3 ceph journal, for /dev/sdd1

In the output above you can see I have three OSDs (sdb1, sdc1, sdd1) and you can see that my journal disk (sde) has three partitions and you can see how they are mapped to echo SSD.