“Ceph-in-a-box”

Software & Applications
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In one of the recent What’s Spinnin’ Episodes, Brett from 45drives mentioned Ceph-in-a-box, an appliance concept to make it easy for folks to get started with ceph and clustering. This is just theoretical and 45drives hasn’t made any official announcement or statement that they are working on such an appliance or that it will feature on their roadmap in the future.

I’m just curious how fellow homelabbers envision such a device to look like?

For most of us , running 3 x HL15s in a cluster is way overkill and not feasible. So perhaps 3 x HL4s or HL8s? But this would not be Ceph-in-a-box in a literal sense, more like Ceph in 3 boxes.

Or would you prefer a custom chassis with provisions to fit 3 or 4 mini ITX boards along with a couple of SSDs and PSU for each board?

Personally, I think both approaches have their use cases. For example, clustering with HL4/8/15 for those who have more storage heavy requirements, whereas the custom chassis for folks who don’t need much storage and just want to run their VMs / services in HA setup.

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I’ve still not had proper time to sit down with Ceph, but I’d wonder if you could create 3 vDevs, pass each to a separate iscsi network, then target one each on 3 smaller systems or vm’s.

I have no clue if this would be “supported” or even recommended.

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To resurrect this thread, I ended up purchasing 3 x Minisforum MS-01s for my ceph cluster.

Would be cool though if 45drives developed something along these lines in the future.

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I can’t be the only one who thinks the Ceph obsession in homelab builds is a bit weird.

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