Were those tests you mentioned on Raid-5/6/Raid-Z/z2 or on Mirrored volumes of some kind? We've found here that VM loads on raid 10 sata volumes, with relatively high numbers of disks actually works pretty well - and depending size of the drives, you quite often get more usuable space too. ;-) I suspect 80 VM's on 20 sata disks might be pushing things though, but it'll depend on the workload. T
________________________________ From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Tim Cook Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 1:18 PM To: Joachim Sandvik Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] Need tips on zfs pool setup.. On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Joachim Sandvik <no-re...@opensolaris.org> wrote: I am looking at a nas software from nexenta, and after some initial testing i like what i see. So i think we will find in funding the budget for a dual setup. We are looking at a dual cpu Supermicro server with about 32gb ram and 2 x250gb OS disks, 21 x 1TB SATA disks, and 1 x 64gb SSD disk. The system will use nexenta's auto-cdp which i think are based on AVS to remote mirror to a system a few miles away. The system will mostly be serving as a NFS server for our Vmware servers. We have about 80 vm's who access the vmfs datastores. I have read that its smart to use a few small raid groups in a larger pools, but i am uncertain about placing 21 disks in 1pool. The setup i have though of so far are: 1 pool with 3 x raidz2 groups with 6x1tb disks. 2x 64gb ssd for cache and 2 spare disks. This should give us about 12TB An another setup i have been thinking about is: 1 pool with 9 x mirror with 2 x 1TB, also with 2 spares and 2 64gb SSD. Do anyone have a recommendation on what might be a good setup? FWIW, I think you're nuts putting that many VM's on SATA disk, SSD as cache or not. If there's ANY kind of I/O load those disks are going to fall flat on their face. VM I/O looks like completely random I/O from the storage perspective, and it tends to be pretty darn latency sensitive. Good luck, I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Every test I've ever done has shown you need SAS/FC for vmware workloads though. --Tim ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________
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