Hey guys, months ago I had the pleasure of taking Suman out for beers when he was in town for OSCON. We kept in touch and he asked me to write a post detailing my RockStor build.
Well, it’s been months in the making and I think I finally have everything written down. Unfortunately, it’s pretty detailed with pictures, part numbers, costs and power consumption info. So I put it on my blog here --> http://puddlehunters.net/ThePathtoRackmount
Long story short, I built an AsRock c2550 based system to virtualize my RockStor install with Proxmox. I’ve got a dual port Mellanox SFP+ card in it that is directly attached to my other Proxmox node. These Avoton and Rangley systems are little beasts. Highly recommended. They come in all flavors supporting up to 16 drives in a Mini-ITX form factor. They are perfect for low power, performant NAS systems.
I use the C2750-D4i running proxmox for my rockstor box.
Had some teething troubles with stablity using the 4.2x kernel and also get some werid issues with NFS between VMS (Not sure NFS from an LXC container works to well even if you do allow it in apparmor) But other than that it’s been running nicely.
I’ve just moved the containers that need access to Rockstor to using CIFS to talk to it to see if that helps (Biggest problem is under load NFS can become unresponsive and then doesn’t seem to recover)
Very cool. I’m looking forward to iSCSI support in RockStor. For now, CIFS does a fine job and is probably easier to manage in a multi-node Proxmox environment. What case did you stick your c2750 in? And how many drives?
At the moment there are 7 Drives but only 3 are used for Storage.
2x 1TB in raid1 - Used by proxmox for VMS
2x 3TB + 1x2TB in RAID5 (Yes i know unbalanced but it’s what I had spare at the time) - Passed through to rockstor for storage
2x Intel SSD 320 40GB (One for proxmox boot, one for the l2arc) for the ZFS that proxmox is using for VM storage.
Originally I had the SSD’s in raid1 but I decided I don’t actually care if that data gets lost, it really doesn’t take that long to reinstall proxmox and reconfigure the VM’s
Same goes for the 2x1TB raid, going to replace that with an SSD and not care if it dies, can back it up weekly and it would only be the VM’s root disks that would be at risk. (Which in the case of most of them don’t hold any data, just the Application/configuration)