Post by Vincent RoyerThanks,
The 3 servers are new Lenovo units with redundant PS backed by two
huge UPS units (on for each bank of power supplies). I think the
chances of losing two nodes is incredibly slim, and in that case a
Disaster Recovery from offsite backups would be reasonable.
My requirements are about 2TB, highly available (so that I can reboot
one of the 3 servers without taking down services).
Beyond that my focus is high performance for small I/O.
This can be a difficult case for GlusterFS, if you mean "small files",
as the metadata lookups are relatively costly (no separate MDS with
in-memory or memory cached database). It's ideally placed for large
files, and small I/O within those files should be OK. just speaking from
experience - should be fine for VMs with such loads, especially if you
shard.
Post by Vincent RoyerSo I could do a single 2TB SSD per server, or two, or many more if
that is "what is required". But I don't want to waste money...
Resilience is never a waste. Skimping may well prove to be a waste of
*your time* when you get woken up at 3am and have to fix a downed
system. Your call entirely. I'm too old for that kind of thing, so I
tend to push for both per-server and per-cluster redundancy. It usually
gets approved after something "unexpected" happens the first time.
Gluster and ZFS will be fine with onboard controllers. If you have
enough ports you'll be just fine. If you need more buy HBA's to stick in
your PCIe slots, M1015s and M1115s on ebay perform very well and are
still dirt cheap.
So are you using ZFS to get compression and checksumming down to the
disk platter level? ZFS will give some gains in performance with
compressible data and corruption protection, but, don't bother with
dedup, I've tried it on 3 distributed filesystems and it bought less
than 3% capacity and slammed performance. If you don't need either
feature just stick with XFS for single-disk or software-RAIDed mirrors
per brick. My personal opinion would be do a ZFS mirror of two SSDs per
server, per brick, ie in your initial case, 2x2TB SSD per box in ZFS
mirror. You can add more mirror sets later to add additional bricks.
Post by Vincent RoyerI like the idea of forgoing the RAID cards as they are quite
expensive, especially the capacitor backed ones. The onboard
controller can handle JBOD just fine, if Gluster is OK with it!
As I also said, if said expensive card dies, and you don't have another
one in stock, you will effectively have lost everything on that server
until you can source a new one (or even /if/ you can).
Use the power of the software to get where you need to be, the tools are
there...
Alex
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