Support md-raid

[sergelogvinov]

Feature Request

There are many dedicated cloud providers offers to us the servers with two or more disks.
Many of them do not have the hardware raid controllers.

It will be very nice to have softraid on the talos platform.

Thank you.

[bmalynovytch]

Supporting MD RAID is not only nice to have, it's mandatory in bare metal setups.
Could it be possible to configure RAID out of Talos (ie. using a rescue OS) and let Talos use MD's autodetect feature or kernel command line to start the volumes ?

[Manouchehri]

Having a RAID1 setup for all drives to boot off of would be great too.

https://outflux.net/blog/archives/2018/04/19/uefi-booting-and-raid1/

[clementd64]

There are many dedicated cloud providers offers to us the servers with two or more disks. Many of them do not have the hardware raid controllers.

Look at Hetzner, OVH, Scaleway. I understand nodes should be disposable, but if we can avoid failure at first it's always better.

Also some IO intensive workload require local disk. The local volume can be handled with CSI driver, but no RAID for the rootfs increase points of failure.

[maxpain]

Any updates on this?

[MikeTolkachev]

I would like to use Talos Linux in my home lab, but I can't.
Since reliability is very important when there are not many servers.

[maxpain]

@MikeTolkachev Does your motherboard support hardware RAID in bios?

[rochecompaan]

I noticed that mdadm was added as extension in this commit: siderolabs/extensions@7618f8f. I imagine this is one step closer to software raid support. What remains to be done before this is fully supported?

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 180 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 7 days.

[bmalynovytch]

Not stale

[bmalynovytch]

Still alive 🕺

[divStar]

To be honest, that's what I also would like for my home-lab.

I currently have two issues with Talos (both possibly being solvable with an md-raid):

1. I'd like to install Talos on two drives and be able to boot from the second drive if the first fails (RAID1).
2. I'd like to combine my 4 U.2 NVMe drives into one storage pool, but with some kind of redundancy level (e.g. RAID5 or RAIDZ1/RAIDZ2).

I am a novice when it comes to Talos and I've been digging for information for quite a few days now. It seems like 2 should be possible, but I don't exactly understand how and 1 is not yet possible? Or am I mistaken?