Xcp-ng, shared storage & OVH Cloud

To date I have been using local storage with xcp-ng VMs and now I am looking to add hosts to a pool. I watched Tom’s video on xcp-ng shared storage and have a few questions:

Q1)
When using shared storage all that is needed locally is to boot xcp-ng whereas the minimum local storage with OVH Cloud is (2X960GB). As xcp-ng only requires 70GB this leaves a lot of unused local storage. Is there a recommended use for the unused local storage?

Q2)
I am looking to test shared storage using TrueNAS Core and am confused about storage options in OVH. It appears to me I can either purchase a dedicated server with a large amount of local storage or purchase a dedicated server with minimal local storage (2X960gb) and purchase OVH Block storage. To add (2X1.92TB) to an Advanced3 server costs $82 whereas the “OVH Classic” 500 IOPS block storage costs $49 per TB so they are on par. The “OVH High Speed” block storage (3000 IOPS) is double the price.

I understand the block storage can grow dynamically whereas the local storage cannot. Is one better than the other?

Q3) Is iSCSI the best way to share storage used for VM disks? It looks like NFS is good being Thin Provisioned, Shared & Officially Supported.

  1. XCP-ng can use the rest of the storage as local storage for VM’s
  2. TrueNAS Core is getting to EOL and you should be using TrueNAS Scale but both should be installed bare metal so I am really not sure how that would work in OVH
  3. iSCSI does work fine and is supported but I prefer NFS because it’s easier to manage as each VM is an individual file and it’s thin provisioned.
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