Dear All, A questions that probalby has been asked by many other users before. I want to do a POC. For the POC I can use old decomissioned hardware. Currently I have 3 x IBM X3550 M5 with: 1 Dualport 10G NIC Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v3 @ 3.50GHz 64GB RAM the other two have a slower CPU but more RAM: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v4 @ 2.40GHz 512GB RAM Of course I can re-arrange the RAM. The switches are not LACP capable, so I'm planning to use bonding in active-active. For the disks I'm planning on buying 12 x Samsung PM883 1.9TB and use them in an EC pool. My questions are: 1. Which bonding mode should I choose? balance-alb? 2. Are the disks ok for a POC? Or should I rather go with more smaller disks (960GB) e.g. 24 in total? 3. Are there any drawbacks when using EC pools? Workload will be mostly VMs (Vsphere / Openstack), but also CephFS with Samba Gateway. Many thanks