With the completion of my ransomware resistance storage research and product announcement, I have now embarked on a new research project. I am looking for an open source virtualization host. I have already tried XCP-NG and I just could not get it to work correctly. I have tried using the virtualization capabilities of TrueNAs core, but it turns out that virtualization has a bit to go in the networking stability area before it is ready for prime time. I then heard about IX System’s SCALE project. This is basically Debian Linux with ZFS on Linux managed by their TrueNAS webUI.
So far in my initial testing it’s worked out well. The KVM hypervisor in Linux is very mature and the ZFS on Linux storage subsystem has made great progress as well. IX wants to also incorporate node scaling of ZFS as well. While that’s outside the scope of my or my client’s needs it’s still something interesting to watch. SCALE right now is at version 21.02 and is considered an Alpha build. Honestly though, this Alpha is much better than many full releases are right now. I have a server 2019 vm running now that’s been rock stable for more than 2 weeks now.
The most exciting part is that since this is ZFS this server can be a backup(via replication) target for a TrueNAS server. I will have another high storage capacity server here in a small bit. Once I have it i will then be able to test the virtualization AND replication target capabilities extensively. if ti works out like I am confident it will I will have a good software stack to offer clients from virtualization to primary storage, to backups, to security and at the lowest end the cost will be minimal…basically just the cost of hardware..:)