Re: RAID question for Ceph

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On 19/07/2018 13:28, Satish Patel wrote:
Thanks for massive details, so what are the options I have can I disable raid controller and run system without raid and use software raid for OS?

Not sure what kind of RAID controller you have. I seem to recall and HP thingy? And those I don't trust at all in HBA mode, I've heard to much bad things about them: They keep messing with the communication to the disk.
Also not sure you can get a firmware version that does HBA only.

Does that make sense ?

Well I run ZFS on FreeBSD, and usually run a zfs mirror for my OS disks.
I guess that for the OS partition it not really matters what you do.
Even RAID it on the controller is not that important. Linux will be able to manage that. And your OS disk are not going to be > 4-6T. So relative oke recover times, and no serious performance requirements.

So you could do either.

Normally we would for a ZFS/Ceph system:
 - have 2 small disks mirrored for OS. Now a days you can get 64-128G
	sata DOM for this. Saves 2 trays in the front.
	Or get a cabinet with 2 2,5"s in the back.
   Connected to the motherboard
 - For a 24 Tray cabinet:
	disktray backplane with individual lanes to each disk
	(have to specifically ask SM for that)
	motherboard with at least 3* 8 PCIe lanes, 2* 10G onboard.
		(would prefer 3*16, but those are relatively rare
		  or they are not fully wired. And require CPUs
		with 48 lanes )
	3 LSI HBA 9207-8i to connect the trays.

--WjW

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 19, 2018, at 6:33 AM, Willem Jan Withagen <wjw@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 19/07/2018 10:53, Simon Ironside wrote:
On 19/07/18 07:59, Dietmar Rieder wrote:
We have P840ar controllers with battery backed cache in our OSD nodes
and configured an individual RAID-0 for each OSD (ceph luminous +
bluestore). We have not seen any problems with this setup so far and
performance is great at least for our workload.
I'm doing the same with LSI RAID controllers for the same reason, to take advantage of the battery backed cache. No problems with this here either. As Troy said, you do need to go through the additional step of creating a single disk RAID0 whenever you replace a disk that you wouldn't with regular HBA.

This discussion has been running on ZFS lists for quite some time and extend...
Since ZFS really does depend on that the software wants direct access to the disk without extra abstraction layers.
And as both with ZFS and Ceph RAID is dead..... these newly designed storage systems solve problems that RAID cannot anymore.
(Read about why new RAID versions will not really save you from crashed disk due to a MTBF time that equals recovery time on new large disks.)

Basic fact remains that RAID controllers sort of lie to the users, and even more the advanced ones with backup batteries. If everything is all well in paradise you will usually get away with it. But if not, that expensive piece of hardware will turn everything in to cr..p.

For example lots of LSI firmware has had bugs in them, especially the Enterprise version can do really wierd things. That is why we install the IT version of the firmware, as to cripple the RAID functionality as much as one can. It turns your expensive RAID controller basically into just a plain HBA. (no more configs for extra disks.)

So unless you HAVE to take it, because you can not rule it out in the system configurator whilest buying. Go for the simple controllers that can act as HBA.

There are a few more things to consider, like
- what is the bandwidth on the disk carrier backplane?
    What kind of port multipliers are used, and is the design as
    it should be. I've seen board with 2 multipliers where it turns
    out that only one is used, and the other only can be used for
    multipath... So is going to be a bottleneck on the feed
    to the multiplier?
- how many lanes from your expensive HBA with multi lane SAS/SATA are
    actually used?
    I have seen 24 tray backplanes that want to run over 2 or 4 SAS
    lanes. Even when you think you are using all 8 lanes from the
    HBA because you have 2 SFF-8087 cables.
    It is not for a reason that SuperMicro also has a disktray
    backplane with 24 individual wired out SAS/SATA ports.
    Just ordering the basic cabinet will probably get you the wrong
    stuff.
  - And once you sort have fixed the bottlenecks here, can you actually
    run all disks at full speed over the controller to the PCI
    bus(ses).
   Even a 16 lane PCIe slot will at very theoretical best do 16Gbit/s.
   Now connect a bunch of 12Gb/s SSD disks to this connector and see
   the bottleneck arise. Even with more than 20 HDD it is going to be
   crowed on this controller.

Normally I'd say: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
But in this case: Lies, damned lies and hardware..... 8-D

--WjW
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