3 nodes, will it run?

[derWalter]

Hey guys, I need your advice, if I am at the right place here.

I am an ex-Networking guy, gone for some years now.
(Switched into social work.)

Now I discovered SCALE and I am interested in getting my fingers dirty again,
so I have to create a case I can motivate myself with :)

I am thinking of starting little, with setting up a NextCloud and data grave for my family.
A small setup like Raid1 10TB, on entry level ECC capable hardware, plus external drives for backup.

So what I need to know, if I got the possibilities with SCALE correctly:
Will it be possible to have 3 identical nodes at three different locations,
all being active, so ppl could use NextCloud locally per LAN and also access any
of the nodes via Internet/VPN.
The data should always be in sync between all three nodes, including identical snapshots,
and so forth.

I am rly interested to realize this with SCALE and dive into the required topics again,
but I don't know if SCALE is meant to build such systems, if its possible with the
available licensing or if I would throw away my time trying to realize this.

Maybe its important to note that I'm not in a rush with this project.


Thanks for your time reading my questions
Walter

 

[ornias]

SCALE will use gluster, if you have a 10-100gb uplink between your locations/datacenter, that should be possible.
The multi-node setup is for high-availability, not for syncing files.

If you want to sync things, you can already setup nextcloud and sync it across 3 instances with Syncthing, that works relatively well.

 

[derWalter]

Hey ornias,

thx for the feedback. I now read a few hours into gluster ontop of zfs.

A thing I cant wrap my head around are zfs snapshots.

first: maybe I didn't get the fundamentals of gluster on top of zfs right,
but how could snapshots being synced across all nodes as well, using gluster?

second: I like the idea of using zfs snapshots with the versions feature of nextcloud,
so this question is linked to my first one: how would that work?
I guess I could just map it, but then my first question reappears.


I read the gluster documentation and different howto and I see only CLI to
configure everything. But I would like to use the TrueNAS GUI, to backup the TrueNAS config,
so that I can reuse it quickly in case of a disaster situation and not have to setup everything
manually again, maybe forget something and have to tinker around for along time.


Thanks for your time reading and hopefully answering my questions
Walter

 

[ornias]

1. Middleware, thats for IX systems to figure out... basically. There currently is not even a ALPHA release of ZFS+Gluster on SCALE, so maybe wait on that before asking how more advanced features are going to be implemented in detail?
2. I don't think there is a way to connect ZFS snapshots with Nextcloud. There is a VERY old (unmaintained) Proof of Concept app, but nothing more (which would require full host access, which it isn't going to have in 99.99% of cases)


I think you are overestimating the state of SCALE:
SCALE is in active development, many of the features you are looking into are NOT available yet, the documentation i even writen yet or might change completely before release.
SCALE is currently not yet in a stage where you can do all these things, we don't even have the clustering ALPHA release yet. It looks like you are looking into what scale is going to do, expecting said features to exist already, which isn't always the case.

Eventually snapshotting would be supported, according to statements from IX. As would restoring snapshots using GUI.
But not in todays ALPHA release (which doesn't even support Gluster itself via GUI)

Before going even deeper than just scale (for example: involving nextcloud versioning):
- Wait till there is a scale version that supports said features
- Make sure you have a basic idea if the thing you want to setup is even possible in basic TrueNAS (non-scale), in this case your whole nextcloud idea is totally unrelated to scale and not even possible on TrueNAS Core afaik.

 

[derWalter]

Well thx for pointing all that out for me.

I realized that I would need a gluster feature like "two-way geo replication",
which unfortunately is not planned to be implemented.
Right now, I see no other way, how what I would like to achieve, could work.
Guess I will go exactly with what you recommended.

First wait for the stable release, then get my fingers dirty and go for a "geo replication",
so I always could go for a manual replication in the other direction, should it be needed.

and maybe I ll put two boxes next to each other as active-active geo masters :)

Thanks so far to discuss this topic with me and
feel free to add later on to this thread, should there be any news to this topic :)


Greetings
Walter