Small Proxmox Cluster

[Digitaldaz]

Hi all,

I'm just about to set up a three node Proxmox cluster with Ceph.

The three machines will all be:

IBM System X3550 M4
Dual: 2.60 GHz Eight (octa) -Core Xeon (E5-2650 V2) - 3.40GHz Turbo Boost Speed - 8GT/20MB
Memory: 192GB - (24 x 8GB) - DDR3 ECC Reg
RAID: Standard M5110 Onboard RAID 512MB FBWC
Network Interface: 4 x 1GB + additional Dual Port Onboard 10GB SFP+ NIC
4 x 960GB SM863a SSD

I will be using the 10GB interfaces without a switch as per the Proxmox documentation, just linking them together with DAC.

I'm thinking that with the above I should get fairly decent throughput and latency but I'm wondering, should I hold off a little while and wait for the bluestore or will the performance enhancement not be that great?

The other big question is should I keep the M5110 RAID or replace with HBAs, I'm seeing differing opinions depending on which thread you read my initial instinct would have been to replace the RAID with 9211-8is.

Thanks

Daz

 

[Digitaldaz]

Can no one advise me on this, these are going in soon?

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

I would ask the ceph user list, when you have a specific HW related question like this.
General it is always better to use a HBA.
Raid controller can make problems.

 

[Digitaldaz]

Thanks for the reply, good idea on checking with ceph, I will do that but in the meantime I have bitten the bullet and ordered three 9211-8i.

I also do not like the idea have having no redundancy on the OS drive so I think what I'm going to do is just put a single SAS cable into the 9211-8i and for now leave one in the IBM HW raid card. That way I figure I can put two 2 x 240GB SM863a in hardware RAID 1 as OS and put the 4 x 960GB SM863a on the 9211-8i. In my head that should work well at least