@scottalanmiller said:
If you can get down to two, then you can go for bigger hosts down the road. Start with two socket hosts if you want, but you can go to four socket hosts to get double the density without getting more nodes. This allows you to do more and more to stay with less management. Going to CEPH only makes sense if you are going to a lot of nodes. It's worth a lot to go to fewer. Since Linux has no licensing complications from having lots of CPUs like Windows does, you get that extra benefit for "free".
They are already quad socket motherboards, so I have that going for me...
At this point I have zero visibility into what our actual workloads are because of the version of OpenStack Cloud we're running on, so I'm going in a bit blind. That is why I'm going to try to just run two hosts and add as necessary.
My reasoning for looking at Ceph in the long run is that I'd like to centralize all of our storage. We currently have an Oracle (Sun) NAS that is very expensive to maintain, and is a single point of failure. This is where all of our critical data is stored (not my design). It is also the backend for some of the VMs running in our existing cloud.