Combine a hyper-converged proxmox cluster with a separate ceph cluster - anybody done that?

[inxamc]

Hi Forum,

we run a hyper-converged 3 node proxmox cluster with a meshed ceph stroage. Apart form using a switch instead of our meshed setup, we would like to add a connected ceph cluster to expand storage capacities.
Has anybody done that?
Is such a setup feasible if we want proxmox-vms tp use storage pools on the dedicated ceph cluster or do we have to go with adding proxmox-ceph-nodes?
Is it possible to use pveceph to install and deploy the dedicated ceph cluster?

Thx for reading - any answer is appreciated!

 

[jdancer]

Don't see why not. Just don't run any VMs on the dedicated Ceph cluster. Never tried it since I do use HCI Ceph cluster without issue.

 

[inxamc]

Thx jdancer,
Yes, we don't have issues with HCL too (great technology stack!), we just want to swap out archived big data which is rarley used.
Of interest is escpeically if someone has used pveceph as a stand-alone installer on a dedicated ceph cluster, since we don't want to use the adm/docker installation used by the current ceph versions. The idea was instead of doing a ceph setup completely manually or via ansible to use pveceph on a ceph only node as setup and management tool, since we need to share some pools with the PVE.

 

[VictorSTS]

AFAIK, pveceph requieres a Proxmox cluster to work, so no, you will not be able to use a pvteceph without Proxmox cluster. One option could be to create another Proxmox cluster + Ceph on new hardware and create credentials/permissions to allow your HCI Proxmox cluster (the one running VMs) to connect to the external Ceph cluster. You can have both types of storages, HCI and external. You could even have many external Ceph storages.