Recommended ZFS setup

[azop]

I want to try ZFS. Would I be better off with 2 x 160GB SSD for the boot / VM store (the vm's are small), or 2 x 250GB SATA with 1 x 160gb SSD w/ zfs for caching? I plan to run 5 openvz and 2 KVM servers. The server will be a E3-1230v3 with 32GB of ram.

Thanks!

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

I would take 2x 160GB SSD, because of less complexity.
If you use a dedicated ZIL(cache) this is a tick faster, assume you are using the same SSD in all scenarios.

 

[drzoidberg33]

I want to try ZFS. Would I be better off with 2 x 160GB SSD for the boot / VM store (the vm's are small), or 2 x 250GB SATA with 1 x 160gb SSD w/ zfs for caching? I plan to run 5 openvz and 2 KVM servers. The server will be a E3-1230v3 with 32GB of ram.

Thanks!

Just remember that you lose LVM snapshots with ZFS, so no live backups for containers.

I've also been trying to figure out the best configuration, decided to go with:

1. Upgraded memory - adding another 8GB for ZFS purposes.
2. 250GB SSD for OpenVZ containers using LVM.
3. 4 x 1TB regular HDDs in raidz2 for VMs.

Was contemplating doing a cache drive too but decided against it as it would complicate things for not much benefit.

Backups are run daily, so not too concerned about losing the single SSD drive.

 

[azop]

Just remember that you lose LVM snapshots with ZFS, so no live backups for containers.

Ugh, I wasn't aware I would lose live backups. I don't want to suspend my containers for backup.

I guess back to hardware raid...

 

[thesubmitter]

I just setup a "dream" zfs setup.

I had 2x1TB SSD + 2x4TB HDD

I have

2x800GB Raid 1 SSD- ZFS

2x10GB ZIL on SSD (raid 1)
2x100GB L2ARC on SSD (raid 0)
2x4TB bulk storage using L2ARC and ZIL from the SSD

To do this - I actually installed proxmox which setup booting correctly with ZFS etc.... but didnt allow me to manage partitionning - then I found a plain debian installer with ZFS support and was able to install wheezy and then install proxmox (I had trouble getting the machines to boot just with that Debian installer).

The SSD caching for the 4TB drives is great.....

ZFS snapshots are superior to LVM snapshots and I think I read somewhere just now that eventually zfs snapshots will be supported for backups.

 

[azop]

Would be it faster to have 2 x 1TB HDD and 1 x 160gb Intel SSD as cache? Does the stock installer support this type of setup?

I may not run containers and may just use kvm VM's for live snapshots with zfs