leonroy
Explorer
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2012
- Messages
- 77
So, feeling a bit stupid.... but here goes:
I built 3 ZFS servers with the following spec.
Hardware:
The past two years have seen a large growth in our ESXi usage and we've gone from 8 VMs to 40+.
Latency however is ridiculous (100ms on virtual disk I/O) and we've hit the limits with number of VMs we've been able to load per box.
First thing we've done is remove the L2ARC. To be honest, now that we understand ZFS a little better we're appreciating that everything needs to be sized carefully and with 16GB of RAM an L2ARC is useless.
We're looking at improving performance, which either entails upgrading to 32GB RAM per box (the limit for the E3 platform) or throwing out the RAM, CPU and MB on the primary and secondary servers and upgrading to an E5 CPU and MB which will allow us to fit 96GB RAM per box (with 16GB RDIMMs).
Any thoughts gratefully appreciated!
I built 3 ZFS servers with the following spec.
Hardware:
- Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCL+-F
- CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220L V2
- RAM: 16GB ECC
- HBA: 2x IBM M1015 in IT mode
- Case: 16 bay SATA/SAS hotswap chassis (Supermicro SC836)
- HD (Data): 16x 1TB disks in a single RAID-Z3 pool
- SLOG: Intel S3700 100GB SSD (8GB partition)
- L2ARC: 256GB Samsung 840 Pro (128GB partition)
The past two years have seen a large growth in our ESXi usage and we've gone from 8 VMs to 40+.
Latency however is ridiculous (100ms on virtual disk I/O) and we've hit the limits with number of VMs we've been able to load per box.
First thing we've done is remove the L2ARC. To be honest, now that we understand ZFS a little better we're appreciating that everything needs to be sized carefully and with 16GB of RAM an L2ARC is useless.
We're looking at improving performance, which either entails upgrading to 32GB RAM per box (the limit for the E3 platform) or throwing out the RAM, CPU and MB on the primary and secondary servers and upgrading to an E5 CPU and MB which will allow us to fit 96GB RAM per box (with 16GB RDIMMs).
Any thoughts gratefully appreciated!