Supermicro Microcloud Cluster

[sapphiron]

Hi All

I am consulting with a client, who is using Proxmox with a Intel Modular server that, which is getting pretty old now.

We are busy looking into replacement hardware for them. Ideally they would like to retain the ability to live migrate they VPS client from one Node to another, for load balancing and hardware maintenance.

I Noticed the following hardware offered by Supermicro.
https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/3U/5038/SYS-5038MD-H8TRF.cfm

We would populate each node with 128GB of RAM and the embedded 8 Core Xeon-D processor. The Node hardware, look like this:
https://www.supermicro.com/a_images/products/views/5038MD-H8TRF_node.jpg

The actual server support 2x 3.5" drives and 4x M.2 NVME drives.

What I am wondering, is if there is a practical method to setup Ceph storage on this sort of hardware. The application requirements, are for a mix of mechanical and fast storage, but if we can only have one, we would prefer to keep just the fast storage.

For Ceph and cluster networking, we would add a PCI-E based 2 port 10gig-E ethernet adaptor to each node and use the built-in 2x 1Gig for VM networking.

We could use the 2x 3.5" bays for OS and storage of VM backups (probably 6 or 10TB drives), with the 4x NVME drives for Ceph.

Recommendation for safe high capacity NVME SSD's would also be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Alwin]

4x M.2 (2x PCI-E 3.0 x4 + 1x PCI-E 2.0 x4 + 1x PCI-E 2.0 x2)

The board has the M.2 connected differently, that will need to be taken into account. While you have 4 M.2 slots, I would argue if you need to upgrade your storage capacity, you are very limited on SSD size and type. I also suspect that the backplane for the HDD slots and power supply are shared, introducing some SPOF. In general, while doable, it may be more cost effective and flexible to use three (or more) U1 rack servers. Depending on the size of your cluster, a separate ceph cluster might be also worth looking into.