Greetings all,

I am planning to migrate my primary local file and zones server to SmartOS, to 
match my datacenter machine configuration. (And because I generally just like 
SmartOS.) I currently have a two pool setup (ignoring rpool): A large, 
relatively slow pool consisting of enterprise-rated 3.5” 7200 RPM SATA disks, 
and a fast, smaller pool consisting of 2.5” 15k SAS disks. I put backups and 
large media files on the large pool, and home directories, databases, working 
set files, and such on the fast pool.

I’m trying to reduce power consumption, so I’m about to upgrade the machine to 
a Haswell processor and lower-power disk chassis. I may try to reduce the 
number of disks, as well. I did some work some time ago to reduce a number of 
physical machines to just one with a bunch of zones, and I’d like to keep it 
down to a single machine, both for power and cost. (I keep offline parts for 
failure recovery, and SmartOS makes this really easy.)

My question is: What is the current wisdom on translating this to SmartOS? I 
seem to recall some advice long ago on this list against having more than one 
pool on a SmartOS machine. Other than splitting the setup into two machines, 
one with a fast pool and one with a large pool, is there any general advice? Do 
people find a properly set up pool of 7200 RPM disks to be reasonably 
performant these days? I know even a small pool of such disks can easily 
saturate a GigE link; I’m more concerned with latency traversing hundreds or 
thousands of directories and returning metadata and small bits of data to 
clients (via NFS, web services, etc.) Do I just need gobs of RAM to solve that 
problem?

Does anyone combine such uses into a single machine? How much pain would I be 
in for if I tried to go for a two-pool setup?

- Geoff



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