I really want to run ceph because it fits a number of criteria I have: gradually adding storage, mismatched disks, fault tolerance, erasure encoding, encryption, support out-of-the-box from other software (like Incus).

But then I look at the hardware suggestions, and they seem like an up-front investment and ongoing cost to keep at least three machines evenly matched on RAM and physical storage. I also want more of a single-box NAS.

Would it be idiotic to put a ceph setup all on one machine? I could run three mons on it with separate physical device backing each so I don’t lose everything from a disk failure with those. I’m not too concerned about speed or network partitioning, this would be lukewarm storage for me.

    • jkrtn@lemmy.mlOP
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      8 months ago

      This was really neat, kinda boils down to “you don’t want to deal with the complexity and it’s horrifically slow.”

  • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Since you are talking mismatched disks, I have gone to unraid after running a ceph cluster. I found it easy to keep adding and upgrading disks in unraid where it made more sense than maintaining or adding nodes. While I like the concept of being able to add nodes for very large storage arrays. My current unraid server is 180tb.

    It is super simple to add/upgrade the storage one disk at a time.

    • jkrtn@lemmy.mlOP
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      8 months ago

      Oh, neat, I’ll have to look into that more. It’s able to have some redundancy and does some sort of rebalancing on disk failures?

      • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It has parity disks, which always need to be the largest disks in your array. You can run with either a single one double parity disk.

        It seems to work well, as that’s how I’ve had to replace a dozen disks in the last year upgrading from 8tb disks to 18 or 22tb disks.

  • infinitevalence@discuss.online
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    8 months ago

    Create 3 VM’s and pass-through disks to each VM. Boom ceph cluster on a single computer.

    ZFS/BRTFS might still be better, but if you really want Ceph this should work and provide expansion and redundancy at a block device level, though you wont have any hardware redundancy regarding power/nodes.

  • False@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Ceph is a huge amount of overhead, both engineering and compute resources, for this usecase.

  • Mautobu@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I did it for a while and last everything. Go for it if your have adequate backups.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzB
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    8 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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