nfs-ganesha-server-and-external-provisioner VS rook

Now, for the purposes of this article, in case you don't have an NFS server available, we will use a simple NFS Server Provisioner, which we'll use only for example purposes. As mentioned before, using a managed solution from a cloud provider or a properly configured HA NFS server in your infrastructure is highly recommended. We'll install not the most up-to-date solution, but it should work for example purposes. We will follow the Quickstart found in the repo, mixed with this repo which does some small tweaks to make it work with K3d, which is summarized in the following commands run from the helm folder:

Some people just setup an NFS share. There's one that uses existing NFS and another that also provides NFS. This becomes a single point of failure though.

Conceptually to attach your storage to your pod, you have to go through 2 objects, the PVC that attaches to the PV, which itself must have a physical support, so the nfs mount on your nodes in hostpath, which is globally disgusting, it is better to inform the NFS server in your PV. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems clear to me. However, if you ask this kind of questions, you might be missing two or three things about K8. I advise you to read the documentation about PV, PVC, SC etc... Also NFS is not POSIX and by nature slow, which can cause inconsistencies in your data, but this is an extreme case. In a logic of automation you can use this: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/nfs-ganesha-server-and-external-provisioner Help yourself with this . https://www.linuxtechi.com/configure-nfs-persistent-volume-kubernetes/

I found something similar that seems to be a continuation of the nfs-server-provisioner- https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/nfs-ganesha-server-and-external-provisioner

I have some experience with Ceph, both for work, and with homelab-y stuff.

First, bear in mind that Ceph is a distributed storage system - so the idea is that you will have multiple nodes.

For learning, you can definitely virtualise it all on a single box - but you'll have a better time with discrete physical machines.

Also, Ceph does prefer physical access to disks (similar to ZFS).

And you do need decent networking connectivity - I think that's the main thing people think of, when they think of high hardware requirements for Ceph. Ideally 10Gbe at the minimum - although more if you want higher performance - there can be a lot of network traffic, particularly with things like backfill. (25Gbps if you can find that gear cheap for homelab - 50Gbps is a technological dead-end. 100Gbps works well).

But honestly, for a homelab, a cheap mini PC or NUC with 10Gbe will work fine, and you should get acceptable performance, and it'll be good for learning.

You can install Ceph directly on bare-metal, or if you want to do the homelab k8s route, you can use Rook (https://rook.io/).

Hope this helps, and good luck! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Another option is to leverage a Kubernetes-native distributed storage solution such as Rook Ceph as the storage backend for stateful components running on Kubernetes. This has the benefit of simplifying application configuration while addressing business requirements for data backup and recovery such as the ability to take volume snapshots at a regular interval and perform application-level data recovery in case of a disaster.

This is beyond your question but might help someone else: I switch from docker-compose to kubernetes for my home lab a while ago. The storage solution I've settled on is Rook. It was a bit of up-front work learning how to get it up but now that it's done my storage is automatically managed by Ceph. I can swap out drives and Ceph basically takes care of everything itself.

The stumbling point I am at is I want to use rook.io(Ceph) as my storage solution for the cluster. The Ceph prerequisites are one of the following:

Have you looked at Rook?

I've briefly run ceph in an external mode, you can actually use a rook deployment to manage it (sort of). Here is the documentation for doing that. For me it didn't pass my testing phase because I need better networking equipment before I can try that.

This article explains the data corruption issue happened in Rook in 2021. The root cause lies in an unexpected place and can also occurs in all Ceph environment. It's interesting that Rook had started to encounter this problem recently even though this problem has existed for a long time. It's due to a series of coincidences. I wrote this article because the word "Atari" used in a non-historical context in 2021.

Rook (this is a nice article for Rook NFS)

Storage: Favor any distributed storage you know to start with for Persistent Volumes: Ceph maybe via rook.io, Longhorn if you go rancher etc

I've dealt with a lot of issues that are very close to just unplugging a node. Unfortunately on node lost, my stateful workloads using rook-ceph block storage won't migrate over to another node automatically due to an issue with rook. Stateless apps (ingress nginx, etc..) not using rook-ceph block failover to another node just fine. I've kind of accepted this for now and I know Longhorn has a feature that makes this work but I find rook-ceph to be more stable for my workloads.