ISCSI - MergerFS - multiple pools on hosts

[voarsh]

I've been digging around for a SAN.

ISCSI seems okay - the 1GbE (or x4) is acceptable for media streaming under 4K.
I am utilising MergerFS to group several disks into one pool, but looking at a high availability disk shelf, I was wondering if anyone new if it might be possible to add the ISCSI storage to Proxmox, mount all the disks (on the different Proxmox hosts in the cluster) under a different pool.

E.G. disk1, disk2 at /storage
Server 2:
disk1, disk2 at /storage 2

So multiple hosts can have those disks at different mountpoints - but it will just be reading (MergerFS shouldn't have multiple read/writes like this.)

Does anyone know if this is feasible?

 

[bbgeek17]

You can add dedicated iSCSI disk to host and treat it as local storage
You can layer a file system on top of it
You can layer mergefs on top of that filesystem and mount it to random mountpoint
You can point Proxmox to store something on that mountpoint as "dir" storage.

You will not be able to use this as shared storage in a cluster. The data will not be available on failover. If you try to share you will most likely run into data consistency issues.

 

[voarsh]

You can add dedicated iSCSI disk to host and treat it as local storage
You can layer a file system on top of it
You can layer mergefs on top of that filesystem and mount it to random mountpoint
You can point Proxmox to store something on that mountpoint as "dir" storage.

You will not be able to use this as shared storage in a cluster. The data will not be available on failover. If you try to share you will most likely run into data consistency issues.

Seems interesting.

I've come across an issue where the SAN (HP MSA 2012i) will format any drives and create a pool.
Formatting my drives is a no go for me, as I would need to get 45+ TB's right now to copy it off so I can "start" this procedure. Asking online, it was suggested to look at Ceph, but I would need 135 TB's +, and movies/TV shows don't really need x3 replicas, it would be too costly for this sort of thing?

Edit:
Also, my servers are SFF based, with one 12 bay LFF DAS box, if I had the budget for more disks, they couldn't go in the other ones unless I swapped them for LFF servers, got 2 extra DAS boxes to expose disks to the host (for Ceph)... on and on...

 

[bbgeek17]

the purpose of any self-respecting "brand" SAN is to provide raw storage that is protected to a client . There is no "SAN" that just gives access to underlying individual disks - you dont need SAN for it, just a DAS will do.
I dont know what you mean by "format", I suspect it creates a RAID and may be pools a few of them into a pool.

As to "will it be too costly" - thats very subjective, only you can answer it.

And to be sure you understand - mergefs is not a filesystem, its a union of existing filesystems. It just provides a nice directory structure, thats it.