I currently have a personal nas running ubuntu server, but I’m considering moving it to opensuse leap. I’ve dabbled a bit with leap inside of virtual machines, but maybe someone more experienced with it can give me a more complete opinion. Also, is btrfs worth getting into, or can I just use ext4 and loose out on nothing (except snapshots)?
As for the reason to switch: that’s something I can get behind, although you could also just slap Proxmox on it an do all your experimenting in VMs; at least that keeps the server itself running as smoothly as possible, while not limiting you in your learning experiences.
As for btrfs: it most certainly does have RAID functionality. RAID5/6 is considered unstable (although I’ve heard/read from plenty of people who have great experiences with it, provided you don’t run into the edge cases), but I’m sticking with RAID1 because I don’t need to run the risk, and I’m not sure if waiting for a checksum calculation whenever something does go pear-shaped is going to do a whole lot of good for me.
Anyway, as for my setup: an HP Microserver (an oldie, a Gen8 with a Xeon switched in) running Leap, powering a few VMs, a collection of Docker containers, and a few “native” services (nginx, PHP, stuff like that). The root fs is a single SSD (btrfs SINGLE with some directories having a flag to disable COW), and there’s a data pool of 3 spinning disks (2x2 and 1x4GB), 4GB effective, that contains “data”. Most of it is setup with Ansible these days, hence no real use for YaST on that machine for me.
Okay, you got me convinced to look into it more!
Out of curiousity though: You have a RAID1 setup with 3 Disks that amounts to 4GB total?