Hi,
> Hi list,
>
> I'm building a NFS server on top of CentOS 8.
> It has 8 x 8 TB HDDs and 2 x 500GB SSDs.
> The spinning drives are in a RAID-6 array. They are 4K sector size.
> The SSDs are in RAID-1 array and with a 512bytes sector size.
>
>
> I want to use the SSDs as a cache using dm-cache. So here what I've done
> so far:
> /dev/sdb ==> SSD raid1 array
> /dev/sdd ==> spinning raid6 array
Looks like you're using a hardware raid controller, right?
>
> I've added "allow_mixed_block_sizes = 1" to lvm.conf to be able to add
> sdb and sdd in the same VG (because of the sector size missmatch). But
> as the LVs will only use one and only one PV I guess it's OK.
>
> # lvcreate -L 500M -n lv_cache_meta VGnfs /dev/sdb
> # lvcreate -l +100%FREE -n lv_cache VGnfs /dev/sdb
> # lvconvert --type cache-pool /dev/VGnfs/lv_cache --poolmetadata
> /dev/VGnfs/lv_cache_meta
> # lvcreate -l +100%FREE -n LVnfs VGnfs /dev/sdd
> # lvconvert --type cache /dev/VGnfs/LVnfs --cachepool /dev/VGnfs/lv_cache
> # lvconvert --cachemode writeback --type cache /dev/VGnfs/LVnfs
> --cachepool /dev/VGnfs/lv_cache
> # mkfs.xfs /dev/VGnfs/LVnfs
>
> And now I'm asking myself if I'm not doing something somewhat dangerous
> for a server that will be critical when in production :]
I can't comment here as I've never used SSD as a cache the way you do it.
> The server has 128GB of RAM so maybe the caching in memory will be
> sufficient to achieve good performance ?
The 128GB will of course help as read cache but what about write cache? If
your raid hardware has battery/flash based write cache and is big enough,
then you could set it in write back mode and make use of it. I'm not sure
your proposed configuration is safe enough.
Regards,
Simon
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