Cannot do Ceph. Lots of storage-related questions.

[akulbe]

I don't have the hardware, or the space for more hardware, to be able to set up a Ceph cluster. I have between 1-7TB of NVMe or SSD local storage in the various nodes across my 4-node cluster. All consumer-grade hardware (for the storage).

What I do have is multiple terabytes of Synology storage. I'm currently using it with NFS. I know iSCSI is an option… but I really don't understand the differences of each, well.

What do you lose, when you can't do Ceph? what features are you missing out on if you use NFS or iSCSI?

What does the local storage give you that shared storage doesn't, in terms of features?

 

[alexskysilk]

What I do have is multiple terabytes of Synology storage. I'm currently using it with NFS. I know iSCSI is an option… but I really don't understand the differences of each, well.

In practice- iscsi COULD be a bit faster, BUT you lose snapshot functionality and all dependent function like online backups. its also possible to serve both nfs and iscsi from your NAS for different purposes if you have mixed use cases.

What do you lose, when you can't do Ceph?

Ceph is a scaleout filesystem with multiple apis (block, file, object.) If you have use for anything relating to that- would be the answer to your question. I think the better approach is "this is what I'm doing with my cluster. how can my hardware be best used to meet my needs?"

What does the local storage give you that shared storage doesn't, in terms of features?

local storage, as the name implies, is local. you cannot run a workload on ANOTHER node if the storage isnt present. "shared" means it would be.