Ceph Is a Beast, ZFS Just Works: Inside the Storage Wars of the Proxmox Community

# Ceph Is a Beast, ZFS Just Works: Inside the Storage Wars of the Proxmox Community Actually, it started with a simple home lab reorganization. A user decided to separate their NAS from their Proxmox setup - a tidy, technical move that spiraled into a passionate debate about two of the most talked-about storage solutions in the virtualization world: Ceph and ZFS replication. What began as a routine upgrade quickly became a crash course in the philosophy of storage itself - performance versus simplicity, control versus chaos, power versus peace of mind. For the uninitiated, this isn't about some cloud giant's infrastructure. This is the story of home lab builders - the tinkerers who run clusters out of basements and garages, who care about redundancy and uptime not because they have to, but because it scratches a deeply satisfying itch. These are people who measure performance in milliseconds, but also in how long it takes to get dinner on the table while the cluster migrates a container. So when one user posted about reorganizing their setup - a two-node Proxmox cluster with a Raspberry Pi as quorum - and asked whether to use Ceph or ZFS replication, the floodgates opened. What followed was a raw, unfiltered look into the soul of the self-hosted community: equal parts technical wizardry, shared frustration, and genuine camaraderie. --- ## The Allure of Ceph: Power, Scale, and Pain "Ceph is a beast," one user wrote. "If you feed it enough OSDs and network speed, it's like a wet dream. Bare minimum hardware? Don't bother." That line could double as Ceph's unofficial slogan. Ceph was born for scale. It's the kind of distributed storage system you find humming inside data centers, handling petabytes like it's nothing. It provides true shared storage - meaning every node in your cluster sees the same live data all the time. In a high-availability setup, Ceph is the golden ticket: instant failover, smooth live migrations, and virtually no downtime. But all that power comes at a price. Ceph's complexity can make or break a home setup. It demands multiple nodes (three at minimum, five or more if you want to sleep at night), high-speed networking, and careful maintenance. And when something does go wrong, it tends to go spectacularly wrong. "Ceph is fine if you have the time to maintain and troubleshoot issues," said one seasoned admin. "ZFS just works because it's simple to maintain." That "simple to maintain" part resonates deeply with the home lab crowd. Most hobbyists don't have the luxury of 24/7 monitoring, redundant power, or a spare switch waiting in the wings. They have day jobs. Ceph, for all its brilliance, often feels like running a Formula 1 car on a suburban street. One user put it bluntly: "Ceph during major code updates is not worth it." Another admitted that an upgrade once nearly took their entire production environment down. It's not that Ceph is unstable - it's that it's unforgiving. You either respect its architecture, or it will remind you why it's meant for data centers, not living rooms. --- ## ZFS Replication: The Quiet Workhorse Then there's ZFS, the quiet overachiever. Where Ceph spreads data dynamically across nodes in real time, ZFS takes a simpler, snapshot-based approach. You can set it to replicate changes at intervals - every 15 minutes, every 5 minutes, or even every minute if you're brave. It's asynchronous, meaning there's always a small risk of data loss if one node fails between replications, but for many home users, that trade-off is worth it. After all, most homelabs don't host mission-critical workloads. "My VMs and LXC containers don't change so much," one user explained. "So this may not be a problem." That's the crux of it. ZFS replication doesn't promise perfection, but it offers enough. It's fast, efficient, and fits neatly into the DIY ethos - reliable without requiring a team of sysadmins on call. In practice, users report replication times as short as three seconds for small virtual machines. One person replicates half a dozen Linux VMs every fifteen minutes, each replication taking only a few seconds. Another runs seven HA guests, all syncing under five seconds. For them, Ceph isn't just overkill - it's unnecessary. And there's something poetic about that. ZFS represents a kind of pragmatic confidence: trusting your setup, knowing your limits, and embracing the occasional imperfection for the sake of sanity. --- ## When "Good Enough" Is Perfect At work, one commenter said, they use both systems: Ceph for the Windows team's five-node cluster, ZFS replication for smaller two-node setups. Both work well. But at home? "There I have one tiny single Proxmox, a working backup system, and a cold standby pre-installed PVE. That's enough." It's a sentiment that ripples through the community - the realization that perfection is expensive, not just in hardware, but in attention. Ceph, with its constant synchronization and overhead, eats bandwidth and resources. ZFS, by contrast, minds its own business until you tell it to act. And for the average home lab, which might be running a mix of file servers, Plex containers, and maybe a few development VMs, "good enough" is often the best possible option. Another user summed it up neatly: "For your home lab, don't try to overdo it." That's not defeatism. It's maturity. It's knowing that tinkering is supposed to be fun - not a part-time job maintaining a mini data center. --- ## Live Migration, the Real Divide One of the biggest differences between Ceph and ZFS replication shows up during live migration - moving a running virtual machine from one node to another without shutting it down. With Ceph, migration is almost instantaneous. Since all nodes see the same data, you're really just transferring the RAM state. ZFS replication, however, has to sync the latest disk changes first, which takes a little longer. "Live migration will go faster with Ceph, as there's nothing to sync," one user explained. "With ZFS it will take the time to sync latest changes first." But again, context matters. For lightly used VMs - which make up the majority of home labs - the difference is negligible. The OP of the original thread tested it themselves: "I have made a test cluster now with ZFS. It takes 8 seconds to migrate a LXC." Eight seconds. That's the kind of delay most people would gladly accept in exchange for simplicity and lower maintenance. --- ## The Hidden Lessons of a Home Lab There's an almost philosophical undercurrent to these discussions. Beneath the benchmarks and replication intervals is a question that transcends technology: how much complexity is too much? Ceph is seductive because it promises control - perfect redundancy, constant synchronization, professional-grade reliability. But it also demands constant attention. ZFS, by contrast, feels like the friendly neighbor who doesn't overstay their welcome. "Ceph can't run on two nodes," another user reminded. "You need at least three - but you really want five or more." That alone disqualifies it for most small setups. Others pushed back. "You can run Ceph on even-numbered nodes. I have four. Works like a charm." But even they admitted that Ceph's requirements - from networking to storage to monitoring - scale up fast. What feels fine in a four-node test can become a nightmare when hardware fails or upgrades roll out. One veteran put it best: "Ceph requirements are said so stupidly high, but for self-hosting it's more than enough." It's a tug-of-war between ideals and reality - the engineer's constant dance between what's possible and what's practical. --- ## The Consumer NVMe Problem The OP confessed to one small mistake: buying consumer-grade NVMe SSDs instead of enterprise ones. "Hope it will be fast anyway," they wrote, half joking. That tiny detail says so much about the home lab mindset. Consumer parts are cheaper, but they don't always hold up under sustained writes - a problem for both Ceph and ZFS, but more punishing in the former. Enterprise drives have higher endurance ratings and better performance under stress, but they're expensive. For a hobby setup, the math doesn't always add up. The solution? Another experiment. "Today I have a 10Gb backbone," the OP said, "but going to test Thunderbolt 40Gb between nodes. Think my consumer NVMe will bottleneck." It's this kind of spirit - balancing thrift, curiosity, and pure technical enthusiasm - that defines the home lab world. You don't just buy hardware; you learn it, break it, rebuild it, and make it do things it was never meant to do. --- ## Why ZFS Keeps Winning Hearts When the dust settled, the consensus leaned heavily toward ZFS replication. Not because it's flashier or faster - but because it fits. It respects the rhythm of home lab life. Ceph, despite its undeniable power, feels like bringing a sledgehammer to a thumbtack. ZFS, on the other hand, is approachable, predictable, and - most importantly - recoverable. "If something goes wrong with Ceph storage, the entire cluster is affected," said one user who'd lived through the nightmare. "With ZFS, each node is storage independent, so if one or two go down, the rest keep going." It's that kind of resilience - not perfection - that makes ZFS so appealing. --- ## The Verdict: Build for Joy, Not Just Redundancy In the end, this wasn't just a debate about file systems. It was a reminder of what draws people to self-hosting in the first place: the joy of creation, the thrill of control, and the satisfaction of making something yours. Ceph is a marvel of engineering - a distributed system capable of running the world's data centers. But ZFS? It's the quiet workhorse, the tool that "just works." And sometimes, especially in the hum of a basement server rack or the glow of a repurposed ThinkCentre running Proxmox, that's all you really need. As one user put it, almost poetically: "Don't try to overdo it." In a community obsessed with uptime, that's a surprisingly grounding thought. Sometimes, the best system isn't the one that does everything. It's the one that lets you sleep through the night. ## Resources - [Proxmox Ceph Documentation](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Cluster) - [ZFS Replication in Proxmox](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux) - [Proxmox Community Forum](https://forum.proxmox.com/)