I was just reading your post, and started wondering why you posted it. I do not see clear question, and you also do not share test results (from your nas vs cephfs smb). So maybe you like some attention in this covid social distancing time? ;) Anyway, I have been 'testing' with ceph for 2,5 years or so. (I am telling you so, you know how to value my info) If you start playing with ceph keep it simple and stick to what is recommended. Do not start looking for unconventional ways making ceph faster, because you are not able to do it better than the developers. You do not know the ins and outs, and you are more likely to shoot yourself in the foot. At least ask first. Eg this bcache, I am not 100% sure what it is, but if it is sitting between the osd process and the disk, it could be getting nasty with a reset/power outage, when ceph thinks data is written to disk, while it is not. I would start by identifying what your minimum performance requirements are, maybe post them, and ask if someone has realized them with a ceph setup. -----Original Message----- Sent: 17 May 2020 13:42 To: ceph-users@xxxxxxx Subject: Ceph as a Fileserver for 3D Content Production 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 _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@xxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@xxxxxxx _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@xxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@xxxxxxx