[wil421]

FreeNAS does not recommend running in a VM and I’ve heard about problems with iSCSI :-). I could easily pick up used Dell servers dual core E5 Xeons with 128gb of ecc RAM and whatever SATA/SAS controllers I want off Craigslist. ESXi costs money and a yearly cost at that but I have played around with the trial version.

But! The FreeNAS community is a bunch of grumpy sys admins. I’m considering going down the Linux and ZFS route. I’d be able to do more with VMs (I feel more comfortable in Linux vs FreeBSD). I’m building some IoT Pi’s to collect data and have it a Linux box would be nice.

The UniFi USG handles DynaDNS and my VPN.

[technofiend]

Raspberry Pis haven't quite got there yet but I'm hoping the next iteration will have an NVME or SATA implementation. Although to be honest it doesn't have to be the Pi. Any small board that'll run Linux, has at least gigabit ethernet and a fast path to disk will do. At that point it'll be possible to make a ceph cluster with one Pi per disk.

[vetinari]

For some time, I've been thinking of making a ceph cluster out of ODROID-HC1 or 2 (https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc2-home-cloud-two).

[technofiend]

A few years go now Western Digital demonstrated an onboard controller with two 1 GB NICs and a mini linux distribution with a single Ceph OSD installed. Unfortunately it never made it out of the lab. I would gladly pay a $50 premium per device for spinning rust to have that onboard. Perhaps the issue is with NVME-connected devices that could be a much costlier device to build? Or maybe there's no standard for housing network-connected storage devices in a rack?