Hello Guys,
So, my old NAS is running 5xRAIDZ1 pool and i was planning to move data and add a few more disks for the archival purpose. It has 16 fixed bays. My question is how much CPU does it need in terms of cores? This one is running off a Kaby Lake 4 Core 8 Threads and given that much of disks, I would prefer to use 10GbE. Any idea if a CPU upgrade is needed in that case?
Any help would be highly appreciated!
Thanks
Are you using a lot of Apps or VMs? You should be fine but it may depend on how many clients are attached. You need to post how the server is used for the best advice
No any kind of apps or VMs at all. I looked for several options in Supermicro. I love the IPMI. Have GIGABYTE and ASRock but their IPMI is not as nice as Supermicro so eventually i was inclined towards Supermicro. To connect the disks, i have LSI 9400-16i and i was looking for a board with the following features in Supermicro:
4/8x DIMM slots to have 128/256GB DDR4 ECC RDIMM RAM
2xM.2 slots for a mirrored boot pool
I looked at entire Supermicro’s website and the pre Sky Lake boards are just consumer grade boards (not talking about the E5 Xeons) that supports max 64GB memory although Coffee Lake and higher supports 128GB memory but they only do UDIMM, not RDIMM. For the maximum ECC benefits i think RDIMM is preferred over UDIMM but not sure. Hence, ended up with a Supermicro LGA4189 (single socket) just to have a full ATX, 2xboot drives for boot pool and some decent memory (128GB). But then, CPU prices went up and i cannot find a decent one supporting 3200MHz.
So, still using the old Kaby Lake one paired with 1285 v6. Bought these long back and it’s nice. While, this is still serving me, but currently only 5 disks and during the resilvers, the CPU utilization is like up to 25%. There will be 2-3 clients (10/25GbE) max at a given time accessing the NAS.
Also, I was planning to setup a sVDEV. I tested it a couple of years back and it helped with how responsive the NAS was but i barely saw any improvements during file transfers. Although, it was performed with my old disks on a test bench. With this many drives, would it really make sense to add a metadata vdev for faster traversing? I don’t think adding metadata vdev is going to increase the throughput but probably the responsiveness. Am i thinking correctly?
Secondly, i think with 16x 16TB, i could go with 2xRAIDZ2 (8 disks in each VDEV). What do you think? The disks are 16TB Seagate EXOS. Will these impact any performance or pool reliability as these are different as 5 drives are X16, 9 drives are X18 and 2 drives are X24 (OEM) - Seagate labelled.
Lastly, I think with this setup, i could go 25GbE. So, not sure what kind of CPU it would require.
Please let me know if you have any more questions. Thank you
Xeon Scalable is a good choice if you need lots of cores, lots of RAM or a lot of PCI lanes.
Not really if you need a high clockspeed. However i assume even a 3.2GHz Scalable can saturate a 25G line.
If you want high clockspeed look at Xeon E, Xeon 6 or EPYC 4000.
@SmallBarky Any insights? I provided all the details.
I think whatever you can find at this point. SMB from Windows is single threaded so the fastest clock speed you can find. You don’t need many cores. The NICs should be doing most of the work with offloading so you should be just fine
Perfect. Is there any minimum CPU requirement for HBA card or the NIC? I plan to use 9400-16i and Intel 25GbE (XXV710/E810) to be able to saturate the speeds for 16 HDDs.
Also, i asked about these two:
I was planning to setup a sVDEV. I tested it a couple of years back and it helped with how responsive the NAS was but i barely saw any improvements during file transfers. Although, it was performed with my old disks on a test bench. With this many drives, would it really make sense to add a metadata vdev for faster traversing? I don’t think adding metadata vdev is going to increase the throughput but probably the responsiveness. Am i thinking correctly?
Secondly, i think with 16x 16TB, i could go with 2xRAIDZ2 (8 disks in each VDEV). What do you think? The disks are 16TB Seagate EXOS. Will these impact any performance or pool reliability as these are different as 5 drives are X16, 9 drives are X18 and 2 drives are X24 (OEM) - Seagate labelled.
I think the VDEV layout you stated would be about the best choice for that number of drives. You probably will have pretty good performance from your pool without special VDEVs. I would test it out first as you would have to destroy the entire pool if you don’t like the setup with sVDEVs. Mixing the drives should be okay. I doubt you would even find much to replace them with for a few years with the drive shortages.
Thank you for the confirmation. I was also thinking that for an archival kind of NAS, but to see if there is a big difference with the sVDEV implementation. But to set it up, i would have to buy the Optanes which is going to cost a lot so without a proper confirmation whether it would provide any significant amount of improvement, it is hard for me to decide.
@SmallBarky Any ideas on this?
