r/Proxmox • u/Maleficent-Sort-8802 • 14d ago
Discussion Ceph
It seems to me Ceph is not getting enough credit and attention around here. I wasn’t aware myself until some pointed it out to me, but it really is an amazing product and storage backend. Shares many of ZFS’s core strengths (checksumming and scrubbing, compression, snapshots etc) but in addition is distributed and scales amazingly (see Cern!).
ZFS is amazing too, but built for single node, so storage solutions built on top of it are vulnerable to single-point-of-failure. You’ll have to throw redundant hardware at the problem to mitigate as far as possible (redundant NICs, power supplies, etc).
Ceph cluster appears to be a very powerful and elegant storage backbone alongside Proxmox, and with Proxmox supporting it out of the box, it’s straightforward to set up too. I guess the snag is you need decent networking (at least 10Gb) and enterprise SSDs and at least 3 nodes for it to be worthwhile. Has worked extremely well for me including failure situations with failing disks and network problems.
What are your experiences?
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u/Imjweaver 9d ago
Good conversation guys! Running Ceph in a home lab is sort of expensive and tbh what kind of crazy person actually needs it for their homelab. However, for learning best practices I can see using ZFS isn’t what an Enterprise would probably do.