What I really want is the ability to start with 2 boxes and move out to 5 over time. Add a new box with bigger hard drives every year for three years and then start retiring older ones.
I'd prefer to use the small SMC 4-bay and use Xeon D-1508's. That'll give me 10G and they're cheap. Upgrade a few of their CPU's every other year and use the oddball ones for simple vms and containers like Ubiquiti. Maybe nextcloud. That stuff.
I also know there isn't a 2 box ceph. FreeNAS has been my tried and true but it just seems so long in the tooth. I installed FreeNAS 11 and tried the new interface. We have a QNAP at the office and that thing is light years beyond FreeNAS.
In a home environment I'm nervous about a long power outage. 3-5 ceph nodes if a utility line is downed by a car or weather it'll mean a full cluster reboot.
DC wise ceph is easy. Home it's a lot to take on with few nodes.
Even with 12 drives in 3 systems is that going to be too small to be usable on 10G? I'm planning to have 3 replicas of everything so if a system goes down I'm fine. I'm also considering using md raid and going easy but then I don't have replicas. Rsync is a solution too but it doesn't get me to expand easily using small form factors.
Maybe what I really need is 2 versions of the SMC. One with slow drives for bulk storage and virtualization version with 8 drives. They're not making that so it's not an option without the bigger FreeNAS case.
I'd prefer to use the small SMC 4-bay and use Xeon D-1508's. That'll give me 10G and they're cheap. Upgrade a few of their CPU's every other year and use the oddball ones for simple vms and containers like Ubiquiti. Maybe nextcloud. That stuff.
I also know there isn't a 2 box ceph. FreeNAS has been my tried and true but it just seems so long in the tooth. I installed FreeNAS 11 and tried the new interface. We have a QNAP at the office and that thing is light years beyond FreeNAS.
In a home environment I'm nervous about a long power outage. 3-5 ceph nodes if a utility line is downed by a car or weather it'll mean a full cluster reboot.
DC wise ceph is easy. Home it's a lot to take on with few nodes.
Even with 12 drives in 3 systems is that going to be too small to be usable on 10G? I'm planning to have 3 replicas of everything so if a system goes down I'm fine. I'm also considering using md raid and going easy but then I don't have replicas. Rsync is a solution too but it doesn't get me to expand easily using small form factors.
Maybe what I really need is 2 versions of the SMC. One with slow drives for bulk storage and virtualization version with 8 drives. They're not making that so it's not an option without the bigger FreeNAS case.