Editing Storage (section)

=== Software Defined Storage and HCI ===
There are two key categories of software defined storage which you could feasibly use in your homelab, though in reality, you are most likely to use the latter.
* Scale-Out Software Defined Storage
* Hyper-converged Infrastructure

A number of Software Defined Storage and HCI solutions are listed on the '''[[Homelab Storage Software]]''' page for further reading.

==== Scale-Out Software Defined Storage====
Unless you have a seriously impressive budget, standard SDS solutions are likely to be something you play with in the lab, more than something which you run your lab on. The main reason for this is that it would require you to run multiple physical nodes dedicated to storage only, which most of us don't / cant afford to do. In an enterprise solution SDS is awesome as it allows you to scale as you grow, and make incremental hardware investments as you require additional capacity. Unless you are running many terabytes of data in your homelab, you are simply not going to need the scalability which SDS afford you.

The one exception to this is probably object storage, where most object storage software is based on scale-out by default, and as such would be appropriate in a homelab environment, even if in reality you actually ended up virtualising it anyway.

==== [[Hyper-converged Infrastructure]] ====
For more detailed information, see the '''[[Hyper-converged Infrastructure]]''' article.
[[File:vsan.png|350px|border|right]]There are a great many benefits to running [[Hyper-converged Infrastructure]] ([[HCI]]) for small businesses, ROBO, etc, and these use cases can be directly equated to the requirements of many homelab users.

If you have sufficient budget and space to run multiple physical chassis in your lab, then perhaps HCI is an ideal solution for you as it comes with the following key benefits:
* No need to invest in a separate physical storage device, saving on budget, power/cooling, and noise.
* Using a mixture of flash and spindle drives, for typical homelab workloads you can expect to get excellent performance as most of the working set will live in flash (for which a reasonable rule of thumb is around 10% of your RAW spindle capacity).
* Many of the [[HCI]] solutions include full support for all of the latest storage enhancements to hypervisors, such as VSAN which supports both VAAI and VVols. This is ideal for helping you to learn these technologies early on in their product lifecycles.
* Assuming you have a reasonable number of bays in each physical host, HCI can potentially scale ''mahoosively''. For example even using small towers with just 4 bays per host, would allow up to 36-40TB of raw space in a 3-node cluster using relatively inexpensive 4TB drives! Even assuming the use of 1x2TB drive and 1x 250GB flash device per host you still end up with 6.75TB of raw space which is more than enough to run a very decent homelab!
* Lastly one massive benefit if you like to keep your lab running 24/7, is the ability to take down individual nodes for maintenance, patching, etc, whilst your lab stays up! With most [[Storage#Local Storage|local storage]], [[Storage#Whitebox Storage|whitebox]], and even [[Storage#Vendor NAS|vendor NAS]] solutions are going to be built on a single controller architecture, meaning to complete patching of your storage software you have to take down all of your lab VMs. For many of us this is a right pain in the rear, and use of HCI avoids this!

[[HCI]] in a homelab is not without its drawbacks in the homelab environment of course:
* It is generally best practice to keep capacity across all nodes roughly the same, so assuming a minimum of 3 nodes in a cluster, as you scale capacity in future you will need to buy at least 3 drives at a time
* You will require chassis with sufficient drive bays to accommodate typically a minimum of two drives.
* To get decent scalability you probably wont want to use an ultra-SFF chassis, though people are already running VSAN on [[Intel NUC]]s. You just have to remember that with a maximum of two drives, if you want to increase storage capacity you either need to replace drives, or add nodes to your cluster.
* There are fewer options available for HCI and SDS than other solutions, however as the [[HCI]] market grows this can be expected to increase both through additional competitors entering the market, and incumbents introducing free tiers in the same fashion as Nutanix did with [[Nutanix CE]] in recent times.
* Most [[HCI]] solutions require reasonably durable flash devices. On a consumer budget you are at a greater risk of needing to replace drives if you use your lab a lot. If you are reasonably conservative in workloads, and use decent consumer drives such as those tested and recommended in the [[VMware VSAN|Open Homelab VSAN]] article, you can expect to get a decent lifetime out of your flash devices and this becomes a non-issue.
* [[HCI]] can be reasonably intensive on your network, so if possible, it is worthwhile considering the use of a dedicated NIC / port for your storage traffic.
* Some [[HCI]] solutions can require a minimum of 1-2 vCPUs and 2-8GB RAM from every host in your cluster. If you are using small hosts with minimal resources, you can end up dedicating significant capacity to your storage software and losing capacity for running VMs. Ideally for an HCI solution you would probably want to run a minimum of 32GB per host to counteract this.