Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
We all understand that there are differences with different RAID types.
The point of the matter is you opt'd for RAID0 because you believe you have a need for all of the IOPS in the world, yet don't care about backups.
But you are missing critical pieces of this design like virtualization, ram cache etc to get better, safer results.
Are IOPS what you want for heavy duty users are making database writes concurrently all day long? I don't know much about drive characteristics/performance other than the basic throughput stuff. Because backup is streamed out in realtime that's taken care of as far as I'm concerned, part of what makes Raid 0 a candidate at least.
Yes IOPS are the consideration you need to be looking at. What has yet to be answered is how active is this database going to actually be?
Will you have 10,000 people/processes constantly making changes?
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@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
We all understand that there are differences with different RAID types.
The point of the matter is you opt'd for RAID0 because you believe you have a need for all of the IOPS in the world, yet don't care about backups.
But you are missing critical pieces of this design like virtualization, ram cache etc to get better, safer results.
Are IOPS what you want for heavy duty users are making database writes concurrently all day long? I don't know much about drive characteristics/performance other than the basic throughput stuff. Because backup is streamed out in realtime that's taken care of as far as I'm concerned, part of what makes Raid 0 a candidate at least.
Yes IOPS are the consideration you need to be looking at. What has yet to be answered is how active is this database going to actually be?
Will you have 10,000 people/processes constantly making changes?
Ideally more than that, but it'll be a gradual climb. Right now it's in private alpha w/ ~ 100 users and they post stuff all the time. Once I make it public I imagine the content volume will skyrocket.
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@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
We all understand that there are differences with different RAID types.
The point of the matter is you opt'd for RAID0 because you believe you have a need for all of the IOPS in the world, yet don't care about backups.
But you are missing critical pieces of this design like virtualization, ram cache etc to get better, safer results.
He's got backups of the data. He's doing devops style backups.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
We all understand that there are differences with different RAID types.
The point of the matter is you opt'd for RAID0 because you believe you have a need for all of the IOPS in the world, yet don't care about backups.
But you are missing critical pieces of this design like virtualization, ram cache etc to get better, safer results.
Are IOPS what you want for heavy duty users are making database writes concurrently all day long? I don't know much about drive characteristics/performance other than the basic throughput stuff. Because backup is streamed out in realtime that's taken care of as far as I'm concerned, part of what makes Raid 0 a candidate at least.
Yes IOPS are the consideration you need to be looking at. What has yet to be answered is how active is this database going to actually be?
Will you have 10,000 people/processes constantly making changes?
Ideally more than that, but it'll be a gradual climb. Right now it's in private alpha w/ ~ 100 users and they post stuff all the time. Once I make it public I imagine the content volume will skyrocket.
MySQL is likely your performance bottleneck there.
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How is your internet going to serve up all this RAID0 SSD awesomeness?? Do you really have the bandwidth to allow the hardware to be the bottleneck?
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Copying to the other server is not a backup, FYI.
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@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Copying to the other server is not a backup, FYI.
Not a good one, that's for sure. As there is no way to be certain that the copy is functional.
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@bnrstnr said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
How is your internet going to serve up all this RAID0 SSD awesomeness?? Do you really have the bandwidth to allow the hardware to be the bottleneck?
A combination of things, I'm architecting the front-end in a way that it sends the bare minimum out to the user on each request and uses persistent libraries to construct the interfaces to decimate the amount of transfer in general, all of the media and static resources are served out by a CDN, etc. But yeah, I don't think bandwidth will be the issue, but the datacenter I use has super duper bandwidth options if it gets to that point from what I understand.
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@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Copying to the other server is not a backup, FYI.
Not a good one, that's for sure. As there is no way to be certain that the copy is functional.
What do you mean? The live sites will be serving from both copies of the database, which is the evidence/certainty that it's functional, no?
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@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Copying to the other server is not a backup, FYI.
I don't think he means that. He has an HA pair AND he's taking a backup from what I saw.
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@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Copying to the other server is not a backup, FYI.
Not a good one, that's for sure. As there is no way to be certain that the copy is functional.
What do you mean? It's a live cluster. That is definitely being testing constantly. It's mirrored, live copies. THe backup itself, that he has to test offline.
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How are you confirming the second server is hosting access to this site?
So this is a active/active setup, correct?
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@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
How are you confirming the second server is hosting access to this site?
So this is a active/active setup, correct?
Yes, it is live/live.
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Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
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@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
Sounds to me like you've thought everything through and are aware of all the pitfalls at least, even if I do think you're worrying overmuch about the performance piece. I'm more focused on that for whatever reason, than that you have an effective network level RAID1.
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@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
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@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@travisdh1 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
Has anyone mentioned going OBR5 instead of split arrays yet?
Also, I'd spend the little extra money for the Pro edition of the Samsung 850 drives if you want to use commodity parts rather than Dell supplied ones.
People did suggest OBR5, yep. The benchmarks I ran ( see the large Crystal DiskMark grid below ) made me feel like I'm going to be giving up a lot of performance for not that much additional peace of mind w/ a 5 given my set up and the ability of either server to temporarily take over duties in a pinch. My overarching goal is for most requests to be as close to perceptibly instant as possible most of the time, w/ some downtime being acceptable.
The drives are all Pros, good tip, thanks.
The big question is... is it performance that affects the application? Benchmarks and raw numbers don't matter all that much. What matters is how the app is impacted. That's why people are asking about the WAN and other components. Getting that kind of performance on such a small web app typically is all throw away performance. Not necessarily, but often.
It's heavily realtime-oriented, by which I mean I'm going to be attempting to stream the presence and actions of users to other users in real time and let them see what the other is doing Google Docs style. The ability to retrieve a good handful of information from MySQL per request in as close to 0 ms as possible is very important for the effect to work correctly, hence wanting to keep the app server and database on the same machine for example. Every little ms counts.
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@creayt Are you making a real-time adult entertainment system?
I'm just not seeing what web application needs to be built from the ground up for your case based on what has been discussed thus far.
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I'll just throw this out there to prove what a benefit virtualization is (and Veeam for that matter).
2 days ago, I upgraded my WDS/MDT server so I could image Windows 10 (1703). I uninstalled Windows ADK and installed the updated version. Then I upgraded MDT to 8443 and upgraded my deployment share. I did a test image of my new setup using a machine type that I had already had in MDT and it worked just great.
Yesterday, I had to add a new machine with drivers, task sequence and selection profiles. When I went to update the deployment share, it failed. It couldn't find the boot wim. It was looking for a new directory in the ADK installation path and when I checked the previous location of where the wim file was it was gone. I don't know what happened to it. I was running short on time because this was a new laptop that had to be sent priority overnight to be there today.
I used Veeam instant recovery to spin up a backup of my WDS MDT server from earlier that day (it only took a minute or two) sans network connection and verified that everything was where I thought it should be on the old one. I tried doing a side-by-side comparison on changing the settings on the 'live' server but I couldn't get it working. I then decided to restore the server back in place of the live server and that took only 15 minutes. I was able to add the new drivers, task sequence and selection profiles and update the deployment share successfully and image the laptop to get it out to the guy for this morning.
I would not have that flexibility to do even half of that stuff with the budget of an SMB without virtualization. I have virtualized everything in the past 6 years. I only have 2 physical servers left. A terminal server and my Exchange server. I will virtualize the first and with Exchange, I am planning on migrating to Office 365 in the next 6 months.
But first, I need to figure out why my WDS/MDT upgrade went tits up.
