G'day all

About to commence an R&D eval of the Ceph platform having been impressed with 
the momentum achieved over the past 12mths.

I have one question re design before rolling out to metal........

I will be using 1x SSD drive per storage server node (assume it is /dev/sdb for 
this discussion), and cannot readily determine the pro/con's for the two 
methods of using it for OSD-Journal, being:
#1. place it in the main [osd] stanza and reference the whole drive as a single 
partition; or
#2. partition up the disk, so 1x partition per SATA HDD, and place each 
partition in the [osd.N] portion

So if I were to code #1 in the ceph.conf file, it would be:
[osd]
osd journal = /dev/sdb

Or, #2 would be like:
[osd.0]
        host = ceph1
        btrfs devs = /dev/sdc
        osd journal = /dev/sdb5
[osd.1]
        host = ceph1
        btrfs devs = /dev/sdd
        osd journal = /dev/sdb6
[osd.2]
        host = ceph1
        btrfs devs = /dev/sde
        osd journal = /dev/sdb7
[osd.3]
        host = ceph1
        btrfs devs = /dev/sdf
        osd journal = /dev/sdb8

I am asking therefore, is the added work (and constraints) of specifying down 
to individual partitions per #2 worth it in performance gains? Does it not also 
have a constraint, in that if I wanted to add more HDD's into the server (we 
buy 45 bay units, and typically provision HDD's "on demand" i.e. 15x at a time 
as usage grows), I would have to additionally partition the SSD (taking it 
offline) - but if it were #1 option, I would only have to add more [osd.N] 
sections (and not have to worry about getting the SSD with 45x partitions)?

One final related question, if I were to use #1 method (which I would prefer if 
there is no material performance or other reason to use #2), then that 
specification (i.e. the "osd journal = /dev/sdb") SSD disk reference would have 
to be identical on all other hardware nodes, yes (I want to use the same 
ceph.conf file on all servers per the doco recommendations)? What would happen 
if for example, the SSD was on /dev/sde on a new node added into the cluster? 
References to /dev/disk/by-id etc are clearly no help, so should a symlink be 
used from the get-go? Eg something like "ln -s /dev/sdb /srv/ssd" on one box, 
and  "ln -s /dev/sde /srv/ssd" on the other box, so that in the [osd] section 
we could use this line which would find the SSD disk on all nodes "osd journal 
= /srv/ssd"?

Many thanks for any advice provided.

Cheers

Paul



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