Proxmox Blade Cluster storage options

[tdkmatt]

Hey All

We have a Dell m1000e blade chasis and x2 m610 (x2 900gb sas) x6 m710 (x4 900gb sas) and we are deploying a proxmox cluster across the 6 710 blades.

My question is we plan to obviously use HA so the internal disks are a waste really... but our main storage server that we plan to use as a SAN is a Dell r610 with x12 900gb sas disks.

I would like to know the best options for running the r610 as a storage server for block storage for the blades.

We looked into freenas as i love zfs but im not keen to have to replace the h700 and flash a 200 series card to get it into it mode and we have 196gb of ram so its not an issue

Our iops requirements are hard to determine as our company scales

Can anyone recommend options they went with for central storage for a proxmox cluster? We want to avoid freenas and look into centos or maybe opensuse?

 

[tdkmatt]

Or maybe something debian based...

We need reliability and preformance

Zfs is still new to me and im a fan of the self healing powers of ext4

 

[MiniKnight]

I mean if you're <$100 in hardware away from FreeNAS, or ZFS on Linux by getting a HBA, that's still a good option.

You could do a Ceph cluster if you've got additional boot disks. If you've got spinners you'll want SSDs in them too with Ceph. I'd stick to ZFS and get good networking.

 

[tdkmatt]

I mean if you're <$100 in hardware away from FreeNAS, or ZFS on Linux by getting a HBA, that's still a good option.

You could do a Ceph cluster if you've got additional boot disks. If you've got spinners you'll want SSDs in them too with Ceph. I'd stick to ZFS and get good networking.

That is a very good point i have a h200 i can flash to it mode i wad not sure of other compatible HBAS for dell

Problem is with ceph the "San" is its own dell r610 can ceph be installed onto one node thag has all the storage for the other 6 node cluster? Each m710 has 4 900gb sas disks and the dell r610 has 12 900gb sas disks and 4 500gb ssds

All networking between the blade and san is 10gb

 

[_alex]

I would look for something based on SCST, what is imho the most reliable iscsi target and also offers iser and srp.
ESOS is maybe worth a look, but also putting scst on top of debian is not that hard.