I’ve wanted to add high-availability to my Proxmox cluster, but I’ve got some work to do first.

CEPH is a distributed storage system that can be used as a storage backend in Proxmox VE. CEPH provides highly available and fault-tolerant storage by distributing data across multiple storage nodes in a cluster.

In Proxmox VE, CEPH can be used as a storage backend for virtual machine disks and containers. This allows for the creation of highly available and scalable virtualized environments that can easily scale up or down as needed.

With CEPH, VMs can auto-migrate on a server failure to provide high-availability.

It looks like CEPH wants 3 storage devices minimum to create a storage array. I’m considering upgrading to 3 USFF systems (see this link for lots of information about USFF desktops as servers). 3 i5 desktops with 16 GB of RAM and NVME drives could make a nice, inexpensive cluster.

Why not use a NUC? The second-hand market is full of off-lease Dell, HP and Lenovo USFF desktops.