Network restructuring advice
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Upgrading the storage of the R730 to house all VMs and data, would it be advisable to leave the current 480s for hosting the VMs and buying 5 10K SAS or 7.2K NLSAS to use as storage? I want to achieve about 6TB of storage.
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Not sure what you mean by "hosting the VMs" as opposed to "use as storage."
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@scottalanmiller said:
Not sure what you mean by "hosting the VMs" as opposed to "use as storage."
Well the VMs would be installed on the SSDs and the application data would be on the other
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@whizzard said:
Well the VMs would be installed on the SSDs and the application data would be on the other
But the application data is part of the VMs, right?
What portion of the VMs would you want to be faster than the data? Is the speed of data access not important?
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@whizzard said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Not sure what you mean by "hosting the VMs" as opposed to "use as storage."
Well the VMs would be installed on the SSDs and the application data would be on the other
It is, but I'm thinking loading time for the OS and application in the event of a reboot. For approximately 100 users, and the most intensive application being document management software, I think the SAS should suffice.
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@whizzard said:
It is, but I'm thinking loading time for the OS and application in the event of a reboot.
OS always goes on the slowest storage possible. How many seconds at reboot is it worth having a slower system all the time? How often do you reboot when people are in the middle of using the system? Is saving one second or two every couple of years valuable compared to much faster systems every day?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@whizzard said:
It is, but I'm thinking loading time for the OS and application in the event of a reboot.
OS always goes on the slowest storage possible. How many seconds at reboot is it worth having a slower system all the time? How often do you reboot when people are in the middle of using the system? Is saving one second or two every couple of years valuable compared to much faster systems every day?
So you'll suggest getting all SSDs? or still some HDDs for the OS? But wouldn't installing the Application on the slower disc, slow down performance of the application even if the application stores or databases are on the faster discs?
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I apologize if I am not explaining clearly
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@whizzard said:
So you'll suggest getting all SSDs? or still some HDDs for the OS? But wouldn't installing the Application on the slower disc, slow down performance of the application even if the application stores or databases are on the faster discs?
Only if the application reads itself from the disk while running. It is possible that this would happen, depending on how the application is designed, but even an enormous application this effect would be trivial and extremely rare. What kind of application are you picturing? All normal applications load into memory the moment that they are first run. They do not return to the disk except to get their data.
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@whizzard said:
So you'll suggest getting all SSDs? or still some HDDs for the OS?
All SSDs to keep things simple. HDs to put OS and applications to save money. It's all about the value of the potential cost savings if you want to shave a few bucks at the cost of performance at boot or load time. If you have just tons and tons of capacity needs, this can make sense pretty easily. If you don't, normally the OS files are pretty small and it is very hard to get this value.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@whizzard said:
So you'll suggest getting all SSDs? or still some HDDs for the OS?
All SSDs to keep things simple. HDs to put OS and applications to save money. It's all about the value of the potential cost savings if you want to shave a few bucks at the cost of performance at boot or load time. If you have just tons and tons of capacity needs, this can make sense pretty easily. If you don't, normally the OS files are pretty small and it is very hard to get this value.
Well I was watching the cost to achieve the 6TB storage via SSDs and it's significantly more. and if going all SSDs I'd replace the 480s and get all even disc for simplicity (which seems like a waste of 3 relatively new SSDs). The document management application has an indexer that constantly reads and writes as documents are scanned, created, accessed or saved. It also has the option to save emails as well to keep all related documents together and easy to find.
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@whizzard said:
Well I was watching the cost to achieve the 6TB storage via SSDs and it's significantly more. and if going all SSDs I'd replace the 480s and get all even disc for simplicity (which seems like a waste of 3 relatively new SSDs). The document management application has an indexer that constantly reads and writes as documents are scanned, created, accessed or saved. It also has the option to save emails as well to keep all related documents together and easy to find.
Well things to consider: SSDs would be used with RAID 5 making them cheaper than they seem but low cost SATA drives would need RAID 1 or RAID 10 in most cases (or RAID 6 if you had a lot of them, 5+) which makes the cost higher than it seems. You lose capacity and performance by splitting the array, so there is that overhead too.
What's the cost difference when you price out both options?
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Exactly - two 6 TB HDD's may be a lot less expensive, but the performance compared to SSD would be insanely different.
How many HDDs would you need to reach your IOPS requirements?
