> We have a need to provide HA storage to a few thousand users, replacing our > aging windows storage server. > > Our storage all comes from a group of equallogic SANs, > and since we've invested in these and vmware, the obvious > > Our storage cluster mentioned above needs to export SMB and maybe NFS, using > samba CTDB and whatever NFS needs (not looked into that yet). My question is > how to present the storage ceph needs given that I'd like the SAN itself to > provide the resilience through it's replication and snapshot capabilities, > but for ceph to provide the logical HA (active/active if possible).
For me it does not seem that Ceph is the most logical solution. Currently you could look at Ceph as a SAN replacement. It can also act like an object store, similar to Amazon S3 / Openstack Swift. The distibuted filesystem part (cephfs) might be a fit but is not really production ready yet as far as I know. ( I think people are using it but I would not put 1000s of users on it yet. E.g. it is missing active-active ha option ) Since you want to keep using the SAN and are using SMB and NFS clients (e.g. no native/ ceph kernel client/ qemu clients) it seems to me you are just adding another layer of complexity without any of the benefits that Ceph can bring. To be brutally honest I would look if the SAN supports NFS / SMB exports. CTDB is nice but it requires a shared filesystem so you would have to look at GFS or something similar. You can get it to work but it is a bit of a PITA. There are also some performance considerations with those filesystems so you should really do some proper testing before any large scale deployments. Cheers, Robert van Leeuwen _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list ceph-users@lists.ceph.com http://lists.ceph.com/listinfo.cgi/ceph-users-ceph.com
