I got 4 20TB drives from Amazon around Black Friday that I want to get setup for network storage. I’ve got 3 descent Ryzen 5000 series desktops that I was thinking about setting up so that I could build my own mini-Kubernetes cluster, but I don’t know if I have enough motivation. I’m pretty OCD so small projects often turn into big projects.

I don’t have an ECC motherboard though, so I want to get some input if BTRFS, ZFS, TrueNAS, or some other solution should be relatively safe without it? I guess it is a risk-factor but I haven’t had any issues yet (fingers crossed). I’ve been out of the CNCF space for a while but Rook used to be the way to go for Ceph on Kubernetes. Has there been any new projects worth checking out or should I just do RAID and get it over with? Does Ceph offer the same level of redundancy or performance? The boards have a single M.2 slot so I could add in some SSD caching.

If I go with RAID, should I do RAID 5 or 6? I’m also a bit worried because the drives are all the same so if there is an issue it could hit multiple drives at once, but I plan to try to have an online backup somewhere and if I order more drives I’ll balance it out with a different manufacturer.

  • andrew@lemmy.stuart.funEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If you’ve got >=3 machines and >=3 devices, I’d suggest at least strongly considering Rook. It should allow for future growth and will let you tolerate the loss of one node at the storage level too, assuming you have replication configured. Which (replication params) you can set per StorageClass in case you want to squeeze every last byte out for cases where you don’t need storage-level replication.

    I’ve run my own k8s cluster for years now, and solid storage from rook really made it take off with respect to how many applications I can build and/or run on it.

    As for backup, there’s velero. Though I haven’t gotten it to work on bare metal. My ideal would be to just use it to store backups in Backblaze B2 given the ridiculously low cost. Presumably I could get there with restic, since that’s my outside-k8s backup solution, but I still haven’t gotten that set up since it’s much more cloud-provider friendly.

    • John Richard@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks. That is what I’m leaning towards. Do you have any suggestions for a particular distro for your K8S nodes? I’m running Arch on my desktop.

      The idea of being able to setup different storage classes is very appealing, as well as learning how to build my on K8S cloud.