Storage solution - multiple small volumes or one big

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Pelle Hanses

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Dec 12, 2015
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Hi,
I have a question about best solution for best performance regarding volume sizes.

We have one Supermicro server, SSG-6048R-E1CR36N, with 2 x CPU E5-2620v3, 256GB RAM and 11 x 4 TB SAS, 11 x 8 TB SATA, 6 x 500 GB SSD and 4 x 256GB SSD. (We have one more with the same performance for our backup system.)
This storage will serve our virtual cluster running Proxmox on four physical nodes. We have 40 running virtual machines.

The disks are for now
  • 11 x 4 TB RAIDZ3 for most of virtual disks.
    2 x 256 GB SSD mirrored for logs
    2 x 256 GB SSD mirrored for cache
  • 6 x 500GB SSD RAID10 for databases
  • 11 x 8 TB RAIDZ3 for backup copies
Three of the 10Gb/s ethernet are aggregated, LACP, to 30 Gb/s ethernet. All nodes in the Proxmox cluster have 20 Gb/s ehternet to the storage.
I feel sometimes that it is slow to read / write from the virtual machines.

Here comes my question:
Will I get better perfomance if I makes smaller volumes, two smaller 5 and 6 x 4 TB SAS RAIDZ2 instead of one 11 x 4 TB SAS RAIDZ3?

/Pelle
 
Joined
Feb 2, 2016
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The more VDEVs that make up a pool, the better the performance, all else being equal.

Two VDEVs making up a pool will have roughly twice the throughput of a single VDEV pool as well as twice the IOPS. RAIDZ3 versus RAIDZ2 may not even be a factor.

In the good old days, we said 'spindles are speed'. That still holds true if you swap 'spindles' for 'VDEVs'.

As an aside - and maybe I'm just not paranoid enough - RAIDZ3 seems like overkill, especially for a backup pool.

Cheers,
Matt
 

Pelle Hanses

Dabbler
Joined
Dec 12, 2015
Messages
11
Thank you for that answer, I suspected that. Then I just have to move all the data and start over :).

/Pelle
 
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