Hi, my Name is Moritz and I am working for a 3D production company. Because of the corona virus I have too much time left and also to much unused hardware. That is why I started playing around with Ceph as a fileserver for us. Here I want to share my experience for all those who are interested. To start of here is my actual running test system. I am interested in the thoughts of the community and also on more suggestions on what to try out with my available Hardware. I don’t know how to test it right now because I am a newbie to ceph and our production file server is a super user-friendly but high performance Synology NAS 😉. All I have done so far was running Crystal disk benchmark on 1 Windows machine on the SMB Share. 3 Nodes: (original those where render workstations that are not in use right now) Each Node is MON MGM OSD Mainboard: ASRock TRX40 Creator CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, 24 Cores, 3.8Ghz RAM: 2 x Samsung 32 GB 2 x 8 DDR4 2666 MHz 288-pin DIMM, Unregistered, ECC (64 GB Total) NIC Public: OnBoard Aquantia 107, 10Gbit NIC Ceph: Intel XXV710-DA2, 2x SFP28, 25Gbit System Drive: 2x Samsung SSD 860 PRO 256GB, SATA, ZFS Raid 1 System: Proxmox VE 6.2, Debian Buster, Ceph Nautilus HBA: Broadcom SAS 9305-16i OSDs: 6x Seagate Exos, 16TB, 7.200 rpm, 12Gb SAS Cache: 1x Micron 9300 MAX 3.2TB U.2 NVME I Played around with setting it up as a WAL/DB Device. Right now I have configured the Micron NVME as a BCache Infront of the 6 Seagate Drives in writeback mode. Because in this configuration BCache takes care of translating random writes to sequential ones for the HDDs I turned the Ceph WAL LOG off. I think Bcache gives more options to tune the System for my use case instead of just putting WAL/DB on the NVME. And also I can easily add cache drives or remove them without touching osds. I set up SMB Shares with the vfs_ceph module. I still have to add CTDB to distribute Samba to all nodes. My Next steps are to keep playing around in tuning the system and testing stability and performance. After that I want to put the Ceph cluster infront of our production NAS. Because our data is not super critical I thought of setting the replicas to 2 and running Rsync overnight to our NAS. That way I can switch to the old NAS at any time and wouldn’t loose more than 1 Day of work which is acceptable for us. This is how I could compare the two solutions side by side with real-life workload. I know that ceph might not be the best solution right now but if I am able to get at least similar performance to our Synology HDD NAS out of it, it would give a super scalable Solution in size and performance to grow with our needs. And who knows what performance improvements we get with ceph in the next 3 years. I am happy to hear your thoughts and ideas. And please I know this might be kind of a crazy setup but I have fun with it and I learned a lot the last few weeks. If my experiment fails I will go back to my original plan: Put FreeNas on two of the Nodes with overnight replication and put the third Node back to his render-friends. 😃 By the way I also have a spare Dell Server: 2x Xeon E5-2630 v3 2,40GHz, 128G Ram. I just don’t have an idea on how to utilize it. Maybe as extra OSD Node or as a separate Samba Server to get the SMB traffic away from the Public Ceph Network. Moritz Wilhelm