I'm setting up a small hosting solution and I'm eager to hear insights from those experienced with Ceph and game servers. My plan is to run Minecraft and possibly other game servers in the future, with aims for VPS hosting later using VirtFusion. I intend to manage everything via Pterodactyl, and use Proxmox as my hypervisor.
Currently, I'm considering the following hardware:
* 4 x Inspur i24 nodes (2U chassis, 4 nodes total) equipped with dual Intel Scalable CPUs and 16 NVMe bays.
* An Arista DCS 7050TX 64 switch that has 48 x 10GbE ports plus 4 x 40GbE uplinks.
* A Dell R730 or R730xd to serve as the compute node for game servers.
My main inquiry is: **Is using Ceph with NVMe OSDs along with a 10G network sufficient for hosting game servers, particularly Minecraft?** If you've dealt with game workloads on Ceph, your advice or experiences would be incredibly helpful before I lock in this setup.
3 Answers
From what I see, Ceph might not be the best fit for your needs. The additional overhead could outweigh any niche advantages. I would recommend having at least 12 disks spread across different hosts to even consider Ceph. If you're low on hardware, maybe look into ZFS. It's worth checking for your use case!
If you're limited on hardware choices, I'd lean towards ZFS. It’s straightforward and might save you some hassle compared to managing a Ceph cluster.
Ceph with NVMe can deliver some serious throughput, but just a heads up: game servers are usually more concerned about consistent latency rather than sheer speed. Since every write goes through a replication path (from OSD to the network and then to other OSDs), you're likely to see some added latency compared to local storage. Minecraft, with its frequent small world writes, could feel that delay, so keep that in mind!
Honestly, most game servers really benefit more from RAM and CPU power than from high-speed disks. Minecraft runs on Java, so you'd want to focus on having plenty of RAM and fast CPUs. The disk activity won’t even come close to maxing out NVMe speed, so SATA SSDs would probably suffice. A good idea is to rent a VM from a cloud provider, run some tests to gather metrics, and tweak things from there.
I did look into ZFS, but I'm struggling to find any NVMe JBOF or servers shipped to Hungary. If I go ZFS, I might end up with only SATA or SAS options. So, would a single ZFS box with SATA/SAS SSDs be better than a 4-node Ceph with NVMe OSDs? Looking for the best performance and future growth.