jamiejunk
Contributor
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2013
- Messages
- 134
We are looking to replace one of our all flash servers that are currently using SATA 2.5 inch SSDs. It’s just serving VM disks to our Promox servers via NFS. It's been great for many years, but it's a bit long in the tooth and I just got some funding opened up. So i'd like to take advantage of that and get us something that will last us for the next 8-10 years like our last box.
I’m wondering what everyone thinks of doing an all NVME storage pool using something like the the Supermicro SuperServer SSG-110P-NTR10.
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/Storage/1U/SSG-110P-NTR10
This is the board used in that machine:
I’m thinking about filling it with ten Samsung 3.8TB PM9A3 drives.
I could do mirrors, but honestly, I think if I set this up as two RaidZ2 vdevs, it would still be more than able to overwhelm the 10gig nics. And the RaidZ2 would give us more space and redundancy. So I’m leaning in that direction.
So I guess I have two questions:
1) If I’m filling this up with NVME drives, what kind of processor do I need? Does it need to be crazy fast to support all of those drives and the possible amount of IO they could generate? Or will the lowest supported proc for this board do just fine serving up stuff over NFS or iscsi to my VM hosts?
2) Has anyone used this system / board yet?
3) Anyone have any advice or pitfalls to watch out for when running an all NVME setup?
4) In the past we’ve always done external JBODS connected to a “head” server using an LSI HBA. But this has the NVME ports on the board itself. So we won’t be doing the JBOD setup this time. Any issues not using an HBA and just using the ports on the motherboard?
Honestly, I'd love to do another JBOD / Head unit like we've done in the past, but with U.2 or U.3 drives. But i'm not seeing any Supermicro shelves that seem to support that kind of setup, and I thought I read some stuff here in the forums that said to stay away from the Broadcom Tri-Mode HBAs, which to my knowledge are the only HBAs that would support an external JBOD with NVME. Although i'd love to be proven wrong :)
Thanks!
I’m wondering what everyone thinks of doing an all NVME storage pool using something like the the Supermicro SuperServer SSG-110P-NTR10.
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/Storage/1U/SSG-110P-NTR10
This is the board used in that machine:
I’m thinking about filling it with ten Samsung 3.8TB PM9A3 drives.
I could do mirrors, but honestly, I think if I set this up as two RaidZ2 vdevs, it would still be more than able to overwhelm the 10gig nics. And the RaidZ2 would give us more space and redundancy. So I’m leaning in that direction.
So I guess I have two questions:
1) If I’m filling this up with NVME drives, what kind of processor do I need? Does it need to be crazy fast to support all of those drives and the possible amount of IO they could generate? Or will the lowest supported proc for this board do just fine serving up stuff over NFS or iscsi to my VM hosts?
2) Has anyone used this system / board yet?
3) Anyone have any advice or pitfalls to watch out for when running an all NVME setup?
4) In the past we’ve always done external JBODS connected to a “head” server using an LSI HBA. But this has the NVME ports on the board itself. So we won’t be doing the JBOD setup this time. Any issues not using an HBA and just using the ports on the motherboard?
Honestly, I'd love to do another JBOD / Head unit like we've done in the past, but with U.2 or U.3 drives. But i'm not seeing any Supermicro shelves that seem to support that kind of setup, and I thought I read some stuff here in the forums that said to stay away from the Broadcom Tri-Mode HBAs, which to my knowledge are the only HBAs that would support an external JBOD with NVME. Although i'd love to be proven wrong :)
Thanks!