Lab setup on redundant hardware - best options for disk layout

[bobmc]

I have access to some old HP proliant servers that have recently been decommissioned and I am wanting to setup a proxmox cluster lab to experiment with ceph/gluster and ha

I have 5 proliant DL360 servers (gen 7 and gen 8) each with dual CPU, 3 of the servers have 80gb of ram while the remaining two have 32gb. Each server has at least 6 nics (but only @ 1GbE)

They all use the default HP raid controller (p410i) so I will need to source some HBA's to make this all work

Each server has a pair of small SAS drives but they look like they will be able to accommodate 8 drives (2.5in) so potentially I have 40 drive slots in my cluster (I will probably boot the server via USB flash drive or SD card)

I have about a dozen 1TB 5400rpm sata drives which will probably be OK for some sort of pooled storage for general fileshares but there obviously needs to be some high-speed storage for hosting purposes.

I'm thinking about trying to find about 20 ex-datacentre SSD's - probably about 180Gb, and then finding another 8 x 1TB sata drives to make each server have 4 x SSD and 4 x SATA drives

Budget is very tight so I can't just go and buy 40 SSD drives although I would like to, I also want there to be a decent amount of fileshare space (at least 10Tb)

Welcome any thoughts or any opinions as to the best way to go

Thanks

 

[Dominic]

HBA is a good idea. You could as start install PVE and run fio or even better some of the applications that you plan to host on the drives you have. Maybe this brings a new perspective on what you really need.