Advice on the use of dedicated servers with Ceph and how to avoid RAID

[agwidarsito]

Hello everyone,

We're currently looking at getting a few dedicated servers but unfortunately their disks are always configured all in hardware backed RAID 1 or all with no RAID. Long term we will end up buying our own hardware so that the OS can be on RAID-1 while the Ceph disks are no, but I'm wondering what the best move is here and if anyone has any ideas. I'm seeing the following options:

1) Go with no RAID and partition one of the disks and install Proxmox on the partition. It won't be backed by RAID, so if this disk fails, the whole host is down. Might be okay though as we will have lots of hosts.
2) Go with RAID 1 across the disks and partition them so that Proxmox is installed on one partition and the other is used by Ceph.

Anyone have any ideas or inputs? Would love to hear your thoughts,

Adrian

 

[Dominic]

You could get two small dedicated OS disks and create a ZFS mirror as root file system. This is a built-in function of the Proxmox VE installer. In this case, do not use hardware RAID.
The rest of the disks is then for Ceph. You should also not use RAID together with Ceph.