I know I'm not the only one in this group that is looking to do something similar, I've seen lots of questions asked about SSD's, but not too many concrete answers.
For now, let's forget I already have 4 ProxMox servers up and running with more than 55 virtual hosts, other than - I'm looking to migrate those to these two new servers.
I have two servers, dual QC 2.5Ghz (8 cores total), 24GB RAM/each, and currently configured with one 512GB SSD, and one 2TB SATA2 drive.
Our existing servers are hitting ~1.5K IOPS with 4 2.5" SATA drives in RAID-10 setup, and I think we've hit our limit.... which is why we're going the SSD route (we have no more physical space in the servers to add more drives, and using an iSCSI SAN is not an option when we are pushing 100MB+ of data at our peaks... How we run our existing setup is we boot off of our 3.5" SATA drive, we have a 2nd SATA drive for backups, and then 4 2.5" SATA drives for VMs. We backup to the local drive first, then fire off a script to scp the backups to the other two machines (so all 3 machines have copies of all the backups at all times to make it faster to restore a machine in the event of a failure. Some of our VMs are 80+GB, so copying them -AT- time of failure isn't really an option).
In our new setup, we were thinking of setting up the server to boot off the 2 TB drive, changing the /var/vz directory to be used for backups, creating a new /var/vz directory on the SSD for VM's, and then setting up DRBD between the two machines for the /var/vz directory.
A couple questions though...
1. Does this sound like a good way to do this in this situation?
2. Will ProxMox HA work in this configuration (with DRBD)?
3. Can DRBD mirror between more than 1 host (we will be adding another 3 or so servers similar in configuration within the next 6-8 months)
4. I am not familiar with SSD's, but I've read several things that are of concern to me (should they be?)
a. You should enable TRIM support.... From what I understand, this is only available in 2.6.33+ of the linux kernel, and we're running 2.6.32 in ProxMox 2.0, correct? What is the recommended way of solving this?
b. You should 'align' your SSD partitions.. Again, not really sure how we'd go about doing that, is it necessary?
c. You should disable atime. You should NOT disable atime. I've read conflicting stories on this. I understand why disabling it would be good, but I've read that mail servers (possibly others) need the atime stamp in order to function properly??
Any help would be greatly appreciated..
-- Rob
For now, let's forget I already have 4 ProxMox servers up and running with more than 55 virtual hosts, other than - I'm looking to migrate those to these two new servers.
I have two servers, dual QC 2.5Ghz (8 cores total), 24GB RAM/each, and currently configured with one 512GB SSD, and one 2TB SATA2 drive.
Our existing servers are hitting ~1.5K IOPS with 4 2.5" SATA drives in RAID-10 setup, and I think we've hit our limit.... which is why we're going the SSD route (we have no more physical space in the servers to add more drives, and using an iSCSI SAN is not an option when we are pushing 100MB+ of data at our peaks... How we run our existing setup is we boot off of our 3.5" SATA drive, we have a 2nd SATA drive for backups, and then 4 2.5" SATA drives for VMs. We backup to the local drive first, then fire off a script to scp the backups to the other two machines (so all 3 machines have copies of all the backups at all times to make it faster to restore a machine in the event of a failure. Some of our VMs are 80+GB, so copying them -AT- time of failure isn't really an option).
In our new setup, we were thinking of setting up the server to boot off the 2 TB drive, changing the /var/vz directory to be used for backups, creating a new /var/vz directory on the SSD for VM's, and then setting up DRBD between the two machines for the /var/vz directory.
A couple questions though...
1. Does this sound like a good way to do this in this situation?
2. Will ProxMox HA work in this configuration (with DRBD)?
3. Can DRBD mirror between more than 1 host (we will be adding another 3 or so servers similar in configuration within the next 6-8 months)
4. I am not familiar with SSD's, but I've read several things that are of concern to me (should they be?)
a. You should enable TRIM support.... From what I understand, this is only available in 2.6.33+ of the linux kernel, and we're running 2.6.32 in ProxMox 2.0, correct? What is the recommended way of solving this?
b. You should 'align' your SSD partitions.. Again, not really sure how we'd go about doing that, is it necessary?
c. You should disable atime. You should NOT disable atime. I've read conflicting stories on this. I understand why disabling it would be good, but I've read that mail servers (possibly others) need the atime stamp in order to function properly??
Any help would be greatly appreciated..
-- Rob