@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@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.
I'm sorry, but the "I'm just not seeing" sentence didn't make sense to me. Were you asking what I'm building or why I have the requirements I do or what? Definitely nothing to do w/ "adult entertainment" hahaha.
@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.
@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.
@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?
@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.
@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.
@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.
Ok these aren't apples to apples, some of the numbers are from the previous config so I'm not saying the Raid 5 to Raid 0 / 10 differences are exactly what they'd be w/ the same number of drives, but the single drive and 2 drive Raid 0 are hopefully helpful in predicting the performance characteristics of 0 at each quantity.
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
RAID 5 gives you N-1 Read and worse for write.
No, all RAID gives you N reads.
Is the explanation for slower reads for Raid 5 because it's doing other stuff on the drives while trying to read ( like writing the parity data ), or should it be simliar to a Raid 0 of the same number of drives?
Strangely enough on this hardware a Raid 0 of just 2 of these SSDs dramatically outperforms a Raid 5 of 5 of the same drives for reads in my first test ( 500 MiB ), as in 1 GB/s faster Seq Q32TI and almost 3 times faster Seq in Crystal, will post the full results in a sec.
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
RAID 5 gives you N-1 Read and worse for write.
No, all RAID gives you N reads.
Is the explanation for slower reads for Raid 5 because it's doing other stuff on the drives while trying to read ( like writing the parity data ), or should it be simliar to a Raid 0 of the same number of drives?
@dashrender 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?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
These servers are 100% SSD, fortunately/unfortunately?
Ok than OBR5 the entire thing, and install Hyper-V to the array. . .
Read an article, I think by Scott, a few years ago that said OBR10 was the OB way to go in almost all cases, may be remembering that wrong. Scott/all, if I'm going to OBR the entire box, is 5 a better option than 10?
Because math - you can use RAID 5 on SSD and be fine. OBR10 is mostly meant for spinning drives due to failure situations, large storage pools, and performance.
Are sequential reads WAY, WAY, WAY slower w/ Raid 5 than Raid 0 and Raid 10 though? That's what it's looking like in my initial benchmarking ( still underway ).
Looks like things are more than twice as fast w/ 0 and 10 in the first test using Crystal DiskMark.
@dashrender 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?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
These servers are 100% SSD, fortunately/unfortunately?
Ok than OBR5 the entire thing, and install Hyper-V to the array. . .
Read an article, I think by Scott, a few years ago that said OBR10 was the OB way to go in almost all cases, may be remembering that wrong. Scott/all, if I'm going to OBR the entire box, is 5 a better option than 10?
Because math - you can use RAID 5 on SSD and be fine. OBR10 is mostly meant for spinning drives due to failure situations.
Gotcha, thank you!
@dashrender 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?:
These servers are 100% SSD, fortunately/unfortunately?
Ok than OBR5 the entire thing, and install Hyper-V to the array. . .
Different sized drives.
To be clear, only the 1TB drives are purchased thusfar, was planning on buying the cheaper/smaller 2x 256GB 850 Pros expressly to install the serverware and host OS on. I don't have to go that route.
@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
These servers are 100% SSD, fortunately/unfortunately?
Ok than OBR5 the entire thing, and install Hyper-V to the array. . .
Read an article, I think by Scott, a few years ago that said OBR10 was the OB way to go in almost all cases, may be remembering that wrong. Scott/all, if I'm going to OBR the entire box, is 5 a better option than 10?
@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@jaredbusch said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
The problem you run into here is that Hyper-V should be put on it's own drives. So you'll need another two drives in RAID 1 to run Hyper-V from, OR you could install Hyper-V on the current RAID1, and assuming there is enough storage space left over on that RAID 1, make the VM VHD for the boot portion of the VM, and on the RAID 0/5 make another VHD mapped into the same VM for the data.
Close, I never even bother with a RAID for Hyper-V. I put it on a SATA drive instead of an array drive.
I think since it's so small I can even just throw it on an SD card, right? These servers have slots for that ( then give the datacenter a back up SD card in case the first one fails ).
Hyper-V doesn't support installing to SD/USB. Just install it to a hard drive. Don't waste an SSD on it.
GTK, thx.
@dustinb3403 said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@jaredbusch said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
The problem you run into here is that Hyper-V should be put on it's own drives. So you'll need another two drives in RAID 1 to run Hyper-V from, OR you could install Hyper-V on the current RAID1, and assuming there is enough storage space left over on that RAID 1, make the VM VHD for the boot portion of the VM, and on the RAID 0/5 make another VHD mapped into the same VM for the data.
Close, I never even bother with a RAID for Hyper-V. I put it on a SATA drive instead of an array drive.
I think since it's so small I can even just throw it on an SD card, right? These servers have slots for that ( then give the datacenter a back up SD card in case the first one fails ).
Hyper-V doesn't support installing to SD/USB. Just install it to a hard drive. Don't waste an SSD on it.
These servers are 100% SSD, fortunately/unfortunately? 
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
The problem you run into here is that Hyper-V should be put on it's own drives. So you'll need another two drives in RAID 1 to run Hyper-V from, OR you could install Hyper-V on the current RAID1, and assuming there is enough storage space left over on that RAID 1, make the VM VHD for the boot portion of the VM, and on the RAID 0/5 make another VHD mapped into the same VM for the data.
Makes sense, thx.
@jaredbusch said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
The problem you run into here is that Hyper-V should be put on it's own drives. So you'll need another two drives in RAID 1 to run Hyper-V from, OR you could install Hyper-V on the current RAID1, and assuming there is enough storage space left over on that RAID 1, make the VM VHD for the boot portion of the VM, and on the RAID 0/5 make another VHD mapped into the same VM for the data.
Close, I never even bother with a RAID for Hyper-V. I put it on a SATA drive instead of an array drive.
I think since it's so small I can even just throw it on an SD card, right? These servers have slots for that ( then give the datacenter a back up SD card in case the first one fails ).
@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?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@creayt said in Is this server strategy reckless and/or insane?:
@dashrender "Easier backups", how so? Seems less-easy.
Can't be less easy. Can be the same or easier. You lose nothing, only gain options.
Less easy because without virtualization all I have to back up are a folder of images and a small handful of MySQL data files. Adding virtualization for the benefits I perceive peeps here to be championing would require backing up the entire VMs, which is less easy not to mention a much much bigger backup footprint, no? What am I missing?
Can't be less easy. Not possible. Literally, it's impossible to be less easy. Because ANY option you have with physical you retain with virtual, but with virtual you have more.
By less easy I just mean less work, less things to back up. I'd still need to back up the same things with virtualization that I will without, but with virtualization there are additional things to back up is all I mean. Easy was a poor choice of words, sorry.
What extra things do you think you need to backup with virtualization?
The virtual machine(s).
You are already backing those up. That's what you are backing up now. So nothing new.
Sorry, think I mispoke. I'm not backing anything up but the MySQL data files and the image uploads.
That's fine. Virtualization changes nothing. You need to back up nothing more. If you sense any additional needs with VMs, that means you have those needs today but are failing ot meet them. So you are likely discovering holes in your backup and recovery strategy that are bothering you, but you didn't realize until we mentioned the virtualization. But literally anything that works today will continue to work virtualized.
Just to be clear, assuming a requirement is Windows, specifically what you all are suggesting is that
Instead of using the host OS, I turn on Hyper V and use a single virtual machine per server and keep all other things identical?
You never want to enable the hyper-v role.
Download Hyper-v from the website, its completely free and is current. You'd be turning on an old version of Hyper-V which makes no sense.
Do you mean Hyper V Server? The standalone thingee?
Yes, Hyper-V is a type 1 server.
If you are enabling the role, it means you are binding your licensing to that hardware for Windows Server. (which is a completely separate product).
Ah, good to know, thank you. Still kind of fresh on what Hyper V Server vs. Hyper V vs. Nano Server vs. Server Core all is, but I think I get it now.