I really want to run ceph because it fits a number of criteria I have: gradually adding storage, mismatched disks, fault tolerance, erasure encoding, encryption, support out-of-the-box from other software (like Incus).
But then I look at the hardware suggestions, and they seem like an up-front investment and ongoing cost to keep at least three machines evenly matched on RAM and physical storage. I also want more of a single-box NAS.
Would it be idiotic to put a ceph setup all on one machine? I could run three mons on it with separate physical device backing each so I don’t lose everything from a disk failure with those. I’m not too concerned about speed or network partitioning, this would be lukewarm storage for me.
Since you are talking mismatched disks, I have gone to unraid after running a ceph cluster. I found it easy to keep adding and upgrading disks in unraid where it made more sense than maintaining or adding nodes. While I like the concept of being able to add nodes for very large storage arrays. My current unraid server is 180tb.
It is super simple to add/upgrade the storage one disk at a time.
Oh, neat, I’ll have to look into that more. It’s able to have some redundancy and does some sort of rebalancing on disk failures?