Robert, thanks for your reply, please see my comments inline ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Robert van Leeuwen" <Robert.vanLeeuwen at spilgames.com> > To: "Andrei Mikhailovsky" <andrei at arhont.com>, ceph-users at lists.ceph.com > Sent: Wednesday, 13 August, 2014 6:57:57 AM > Subject: RE: cache pools on hypervisor servers > > I was hoping to get some answers on how would ceph behaive when I install > > SSDs on the hypervisor level and use them as cache pool. > > Let's say I've got 10 kvm hypervisors and I install one 512GB ssd on each > > server. > >I then create a cache pool for my storage cluster using these ssds. My > >questions are: > > > >1. How would the network IO flow when I am performing read and writes on the > >virtual machines? Would writes get stored on the hypervisor's ssd disk > >right away or would the rights be directed to the osd servers >first and > >then redirected back to the cache pool on the hypervisor's ssd? Similarly, > >would reads go to the osd servers and then redirected to the cache pool on > >the hypervisors? > You would need to make an OSD of your hypervisors. > Data would be "striped" across all hypervisors in the cache pool. > So you would shift traffic from: > hypervisors -> dedicated ceph OSD pool > to > hypervisors -> hypervisors running a OSD with SSD > Note that the local OSD also has to to do OSD replication traffic so you are > increasing the network load on the hypervisors by quite a bit. Personally I am not worried too much about the hypervisor - hypervisor traffic as I am using a dedicated infiniband network for storage. It is not used for the guest to guest or the internet traffic or anything else. I would like to decrease or at least smooth out the traffic peaks between the hypervisors and the SAS/SATA osd storage servers. I guess the ssd cache pool would enable me to do that as the eviction rate should be more structured compared to the random io writes that guest vms generate. > > Would majority of network traffic shift to the cache pool level and stay at > > the hypervisors level rather than hypervisor / osd server level? > I guess it depends on your access patterns and how much data needs to be > migrated back and forth to the regular storage. > I'm very interested in the effect of caching pools in combination with > running VMs on them so I'd be happy to hear what you find ;) I will give it a try and share back the results when we get the ssd kit. > As a side note: Running OSDs on hypervisors would not be my preferred choice > since hypervisor load might impact Ceph performance. Do you think it is not a good idea even if you have a lot of cores on the hypervisors? Like 24 or 32 per host server? According to my monitoring, our osd servers are not that stressed and generally have over 50% of free cpu power. Having said this, ssd osds will generate more io and throughput compared to the sas/sata osds, so the cpu load might be higher. Not really sure here. > I guess you can end up with pretty weird/unwanted results when your > hypervisors get above a certain load threshold. > I would certainly test a lot with high loads before putting it in > production... Definitely! > Cheers, > Robert van Leeuwen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.ceph.com/pipermail/ceph-users-ceph.com/attachments/20140813/94a7e7d5/attachment.htm>