BUILD New E5 (for ESX) Build - thoughts?

[depasseg]

Any compatibility or other issues?

Thanks,
Greg

SUPERMICRO 5028R-E1CR12L Chassis
http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/5028/SSG-5028R-E1CR12L.cfm

SuperMicro X10SRH-CLN4F Motherboard
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X10SRH-CLN4F.cfm

128GB DDR4 2133MHz ECC RDIMM
Intel Xeon E5-2637 v3 (4C, 3.5GHz, 15MB)

12x WD RE SAS 4 TB Enterprise Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 7200 RPM, SAS, 32 MB Cache - WD4001FYYG View: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0090UGQ2C/ref=pe_385040_30332200_TE_item


2x Intel 2.5-Inch 200 GB Internal Solid State Drive SSDSC2BA200G301
View: http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00A8NWD68/ref=pe_385040_30332200_TE_item


I also have an M1015 (as a backup to connect to the drives, in case I have problems with the LSI 3008.)

 

[mjws00]

Looks delicious. I'm crunching numbers on something similar. Would have been nice if they put a 10Gb option on a single cpu board. I still pucker a little when I start lusting after clock speed on the new E5's. Things escalate quickly. :)

I'm glad to see more of these coming online. Who can possibly fault your choices... they are kind of the who's who of components. Nearline SAS is a nice touch. Hopefully they have most of the kinks worked out of the 3008 drivers.

Look forward to seeing it come together.

 

[depasseg]

I'm also looking for ideas on datasets. This will be an ESX datastore (20 vm's, only one DB) as well as a CIFS share (2 different datasets). Not sure if I should do a single vdev, or 2. And which way to configure the drives: 6x mirrors, 4x3 drive RaidZ1, 3x4 drive RaidZ2, something else. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Greg

 

[mjws00]

Heh. I thought you'd have 100 folks in here yapping about e5 v3 goodness. We all want it some of us just have to be patient. ;)

In my mind the only real choice for datastores is mirrors. Unless you can somehow prove you won't need the iops and the small space gain is worth it.
After that, throw away z1 forever. 3x4 drive z2 nets the same space as mirrors with a small benefit wrt to fault tolerance, and half the iops. Yuck. 6x2 z2 is the low performance high space option and is viable, if it meets the needs of your workloads.

The bottom line is 4 drives parity vs 6 with the mirrors. But triple the iops with the second option. A single wide vdev to me is only viable for semi cold storage, I can't think of a db that wouldn't suffer.

 

[borisnet]

Just out of curiosity, how do you backup such a build?

 

[depasseg]

Thanks, I was leaning mirrors. Appreciate the analysis.

As for backup, we have 3 ReadyNas Pro 6's (6 drives each) that I'm going to try to install freenas on, and then use ZFS replication. If that doesn't work, I'll likely use Rsync.