Gluster and RAID question
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@scottalanmiller said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
Yes, for instance the 2U 4-node servers from Supermicro.
Each node has 6 hot swap bays, dual CPUs, PCIe slot etc. So 4 complete servers in one.Problem there is, that's a very limited amount of storage. All that compute power, and almost no storage. But what he actually needs is the opposite.
In this case yes, but you could for instance use the exact same model with 3.5" drives instead and get 3x16=48TB per node. Or if that is not enough, just go with hooking up external disc enclosures to those nodes that need lot's of storage - assuming that a cluster of nodes might be doing more than just backup.
For instance the 847 from Supermicro is pretty common. Gives you 44x3.5" hotswap bays in 4U. So 44x16=704TB raw storage.
You can use one enclosure to provide disk space for 4 nodes if you wanted. Hundred different options of course. You could also do three 2U servers, each with 16x3.5" bays giving you 256TB per server. It all depends on how high density and how flexible you need it to be.
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@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
You can use one enclosure to provide disk space for 4 nodes if you wanted. Hundred different options of course. It also depends on how high density and how flexible you need it to be.
The thing is, you only need one node. There's no purpose to the other three nodes
The enclosures with all the drives are great and make sense. The additional compute nodes don't, they aren't really serving any purpose at all here. This is really either a single node standalone system. Or it is a scale out system. Regardless of which approach you take, multiple nodes in one enclosure don't make sense for this kind of use case.
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I think its safe to say I'll probably never be asked (or even want to) design a system where Gluster may be used as it seems its waaaay over my head at this stage of the game.
I don't even know what @scottalanmiller solutions are!
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@scottalanmiller said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
You can use one enclosure to provide disk space for 4 nodes if you wanted. Hundred different options of course. It also depends on how high density and how flexible you need it to be.
The thing is, you only need one node. There's no purpose to the other three nodes
The enclosures with all the drives are great and make sense. The additional compute nodes don't, they aren't really serving any purpose at all here. This is really either a single node standalone system. Or it is a scale out system. Regardless of which approach you take, multiple nodes in one enclosure don't make sense for this kind of use case.
Yes, the multi-node servers just makes sense when you need multiple servers
It's actually cheaper both running them and buying them that way, compared to individual servers with the same specs.
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@biggen said in Gluster and RAID question:
I think its safe to say I'll probably never be asked (or even want to) design a system where Gluster may be used as it seems its waaaay over my head at this stage of the game.
I don't even know what @scottalanmiller solutions are!
You don't know @scottalanmiller solutions? Then I wonder how you wondered in Gluster in the first place? It's so far beyond his solutions, it's almost crazy to even consider Gluster when considering the solutions Scott spoke of.
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@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
@scottalanmiller said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
You can use one enclosure to provide disk space for 4 nodes if you wanted. Hundred different options of course. It also depends on how high density and how flexible you need it to be.
The thing is, you only need one node. There's no purpose to the other three nodes
The enclosures with all the drives are great and make sense. The additional compute nodes don't, they aren't really serving any purpose at all here. This is really either a single node standalone system. Or it is a scale out system. Regardless of which approach you take, multiple nodes in one enclosure don't make sense for this kind of use case.
Yes, the multi-node servers just makes sense when you need multiple servers
It's actually cheaper both running them and buying them that way, compared to individual servers with the same specs.
Is it? I suppose maybe - if you need a ton of compute and almost no storage, sure, but that rarely seems to be the case.
Considering the density of VMs you can get on a dual socket VM Host these days, compute is normally the last resource to run out - RAM or storage are much more likely. -
@Dashrender said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
@scottalanmiller said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
You can use one enclosure to provide disk space for 4 nodes if you wanted. Hundred different options of course. It also depends on how high density and how flexible you need it to be.
The thing is, you only need one node. There's no purpose to the other three nodes
The enclosures with all the drives are great and make sense. The additional compute nodes don't, they aren't really serving any purpose at all here. This is really either a single node standalone system. Or it is a scale out system. Regardless of which approach you take, multiple nodes in one enclosure don't make sense for this kind of use case.
Yes, the multi-node servers just makes sense when you need multiple servers
It's actually cheaper both running them and buying them that way, compared to individual servers with the same specs.
Is it? I suppose maybe - if you need a ton of compute and almost no storage, sure, but that rarely seems to be the case.
Considering the density of VMs you can get on a dual socket VM Host these days, compute is normally the last resource to run out - RAM or storage are much more likely.Well, you have to realize that storage density has increased and multi-node servers come in a lot of different models. The ratio between compute and storage entirely depends on which model you pick.
For instance this one with 4 nodes:
If we spec' it with readily available components today each node would have:
2x28 core Intel Platinum CPUs, 3TB RAM, 128GB SSD boot, 4TB NVMe SSD storage, 48TB HDD storage, 100 Gigabit ethernet.Isn't 48TB per node enough storage?
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@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Dashrender said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
@scottalanmiller said in Gluster and RAID question:
@Pete-S said in Gluster and RAID question:
You can use one enclosure to provide disk space for 4 nodes if you wanted. Hundred different options of course. It also depends on how high density and how flexible you need it to be.
The thing is, you only need one node. There's no purpose to the other three nodes
The enclosures with all the drives are great and make sense. The additional compute nodes don't, they aren't really serving any purpose at all here. This is really either a single node standalone system. Or it is a scale out system. Regardless of which approach you take, multiple nodes in one enclosure don't make sense for this kind of use case.
Yes, the multi-node servers just makes sense when you need multiple servers
It's actually cheaper both running them and buying them that way, compared to individual servers with the same specs.
Is it? I suppose maybe - if you need a ton of compute and almost no storage, sure, but that rarely seems to be the case.
Considering the density of VMs you can get on a dual socket VM Host these days, compute is normally the last resource to run out - RAM or storage are much more likely.Well, you have to realize that storage density has increased and multi-node servers come in a lot of different models. The ratio between compute and storage entirely depends on which model you pick.
For instance this one with 4 nodes:
If we spec' it with readily available components today each node would have:
2x28 core Intel Platinum CPUs, 3TB RAM, 128GB SSD boot, 4TB NVMe SSD storage, 48TB HDD storage, 100 Gigabit ethernet.Isn't 48TB per node enough storage?
Still no more storage than a standard 2u server, without the SPOF "feature". If you need 8 64cpu/128 thread EPYC CPU in a single 2u chassis is the only time these things make any sense. And seriously, who needs more than 256 threads per 2u of rack space?
Yes, I know the workloads exist, but they're not common!
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@biggen said in Gluster and RAID question:
I don't even know what @scottalanmiller solutions are!
I'm not sure that I do, either. LOL
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@biggen said in Gluster and RAID question:
I think its safe to say I'll probably never be asked (or even want to) design a system where Gluster may be used as it seems its waaaay over my head at this stage of the game.
Not necessarily, but it's not as likely as you were thinking I think.
You might easily be in a situation where you need a huge virtualization cluster that's, other than being big, relatively low performance and pretty simple. Gluster might be just perfect for that. And something like Proxmox will potentially do that automatically for you making it that much simpler.
Gluster is a great tool with lots of applicability. But you will likely approach it from a different perspective.
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@travisdh1 said in Gluster and RAID question:
Still no more storage than a standard 2u server, without the SPOF "feature".
It's a neat box, and I like them a lot. But they do retain a light SPOF of the chassis itself. When people talk about the "forklift failure", for example, this doesn't protect against it. Or water leaks. Things of that nature.
Sure, two boxes directly next to each other help very little, the idea of a cluster is that the nodes should be at least in adjacent racks, not adjacent rack slots, but.... it's something.
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@scottalanmiller I've shied away from Proxmox over the years primarily for the fact that they didn't offer much in the way of Pro support. I'm currently running xcp-ng which I really like. Perhaps it worth looking at Proxmox once again.
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@biggen said in Gluster and RAID question:
@scottalanmiller I've shied away from Proxmox over the years primarily for the fact that they didn't offer much in the way of Pro support. I'm currently running xcp-ng which I really like. Perhaps it worth looking at Proxmox once again.
Proxmox is fine, but that's not a good reason to move to them. XCP-NG supports Gluster just fine, if you have a use case for it. Gluster is just "another filesystem for Linux", so anything using Linux to talk to the filesystem gets Gluster natively.
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@scottalanmiller said in Gluster and RAID question:
@biggen said in Gluster and RAID question:
So your VMs are running off the Gluster?
Gluster is generally used for that, yes. Because backup storage rarely can leverage the advantages of Gluster, it just doesn't make sense. But for VMs, that's Gluster's bread and butter.
VMs really "never" should be running off of a SAN. That's exactly the least likely option to make sense.
We used it for automounted home directories for a while. It works well for that also.
