MeatTreats
Dabbler
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2021
- Messages
- 26
Copied from my Reddit post, corrected some typos and added a little bit here and there.
So I guess people are telling me that Ceph isn't ideal for file servers but Gluster is and that is what TrueNAS SCALE uses on top of ZFS. But it also seems from what people are saying is that SCALE is unstable and "not ready" for serious use so... idk.
How would I even do this with my current servers?
So I have 3 file servers each with different and legacy versions of FreeNAS installed on them. I have empty servers that have never been used and used servers and JBODs are still plentiful and cheap on ebay. My setup is.... not great to say the least and I need to do something about it. I like ZFS but it's restrictions and disk basted RAID make it harder to grow and less resilient than a node based setup.
So I currently have a filling cabinet full of external hard drives that haven't been powered on in years. I have over a dozen 5TB and 6TB internal drives that were filled and removed from my PC and put back into their antistatic bags and put back into their retail boxes and have been sitting, again without being powered up for years. I have I 24 bay server that was only half populated with 4TB drives that was filled and has been sitting powered down for years. I have a 36 bay Supermicro that is completely full of 5TB and 6TB hard drives. This server is completely full and has been powered down for years. My last server is a 48 drive top loader with 6TB and 10TB drives and it is horribly configured. I don't know why but when I set it up I made each vdev 16 drives wide which is bad on performance. While this server isn't anywhere near full, I haven't been using it because I had 2 drives drop out of a single vdev and losing one more would put me in a really bad spot (an ongoing issue that has yet to be resolved)(hence my stupidity in making each vdev so big). I think the server might have a bad backplane as the drives that dropped out of the array tested good. I've just been too to deal with it. I also have 9 drives in my PC of mostly 6TB and 10TB that are full and the only reason for that is my servers are either full or unavailable and I have nowhere to put the data. Lastly, I have a big plastic bin full of cheap writable CD's and DVD's that are at least 15 years old. I know that the data on those is very likely degraded and unrecoverable but hey, you never know.
So that is my setup and as you can see, I need to get my hoard properly sorted out.
I only have experience with FreeNAS, Ubuntu and OpenMediaVault as far as Linux is concerned and only with GUIs.
My research into Ceph points to Proxmox but that talks about VMs and containers and all of that is beyond me. I just want a TrusNAS like OS with an easy to setup Ceph cluster managed by a GUI that obviously has SMB support so I can access everything on my Windows PC. From what I read, Ceph is network intensive but all my servers have Mellanox Connect X-2 cards with 2 10 gig NICs and I also have a 48 port 40GBE switch so setting up the network side of this cluster shouldn't be a problem.
So I guess people are telling me that Ceph isn't ideal for file servers but Gluster is and that is what TrueNAS SCALE uses on top of ZFS. But it also seems from what people are saying is that SCALE is unstable and "not ready" for serious use so... idk.
How would I even do this with my current servers?