PetaSAN?
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Anyone used or evaluated this product (http://www.petasan.org/)? I hadn't heard of it before someone inquired about using it over on the XCP-ng forums.
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That would be a terrible idea generally. First of all, it's SAN so has almost no viable use case. In the rare cases where you do have a use case for SAN with virtualization you want performance and PetaSAN is CEPH under the hood - which isn't very performant. So this would not only be slow because it is a SAN, but also slow because it's a SAN built on slow CEPH. CEPH is so slow that there are whole products, like from Starwind, built just to make it fast enough to use for virtualization.
PetaSAN is basically just a SAM-SD approach, but specifically using CEPH to scale out, which just isn't something useful in the real world.
The real question would be.... where does this have a viable use case and why is anyone looking at something like this? What makes someone feel that this is worth investigating?
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If you need a Scale Out SAN for non-virtualization needs, then this would likely be a very good product given its components. However, as we've seen, just because something is built from good components (FreeNAS, OpenFiler) doesn't always result in good final products. I have no direct experience with PetaSAN so can't speak to their team or approach, only that their selected components are good for slow, scale out SAN use; but have no reasonable place in a virtualization setup.
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PetaSAN, at least in component form, would make an excellent backup target array, for example.
