Comments inline > On Oct 4, 2020, at 2:27 PM, Ignacio Ocampo <nafiux@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Physical space isn't a constraint at this point, the only requirement I've in mind is to maintain a low level of noise (since the equipment will be in my office) and if possible low energy consumption. > > Based on my limited experience, the only downside with used hardware is the level of noise and power consumption. I think that building a new one with a non-fancy big box <https://www.newegg.com/black-fractal-design-node-micro-atx-cube-case/p/N82E16811352047> and a typical CPU fan <https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KBXKP8W/> can help. But I'm not quite convinced this is a good idea, I would rather prefer to purchase old hardware that works and add new HDD, SSD, NVMe just I don't know which one to choice. > > If you guys have any suggestions about used hardware that can be a good fit considering mainly low noise, please let me know. So we didn’t get these requirements initially, there’s no way for us to help you when the requirements aren’t available for us to consider, even if we had time to consider every one of them for you. As you might imagine this question lab kit comes up a lot, and we aren’t just answering it for you, but also for others who might have the forethought to search the list as well. Things are changing constantly as well. What’s “best” today might not be so tomorrow. We all started somewhere, so it’s a pleasure to help, but there are always hidden requirements and the folks on the list here are usually not working with the same requirements. For instance, most aren’t concerned about noise because it’s in a big insulated room. They won’t have much to contribute in that regard. If noise is the primary requirement, I would probably get a bunch of Raspberry Pis and add SSDs on the USB ports. I hope you see what I mean by now :-) There are too many tradeoffs to help each person find a perfect fit. > Your feedback has been extremely helpful, I will actually modify the plan to utilize SFP+ instead of ethernet, the MikroTik Router Switch is wonderful, I want it. > > For the spindles (Are you referring to HDD right?) I selected a 6TB HDD (without any prior experience, I've read that it's like a good balance between a big disk and a small disk, that will impact the recovery time), my plan is to have 5 HDD per Node, with a total capacity of 30 TB per node. > > Regarding the kind of workloads I've in mind, in order of priority are: Block Storage for OpenStack (it will be a mix of apps: databases, web servers, etc), Object Storage (to develop apps compatible with S3), I don't think I will need File Storage at this point. > > I know HDDs are slow and provide a low IOPS, but since I will have 15 HDD spread across the 3-nodes Ceph cluster, I thought it will help a little bit with the performance, and if needed, I will slowly increase the number of OSD nodes to continue linearly scaling the performance and capacity of the cluster. Should I consider enterprise-grade SSD instead of HDD from day 1? > > Thanks for your support! As earlier, if you are trying to learn about the behaviors of the devices, I would take a mix of both, with not too many of any type that you regret it if you don’t use them. Can you use 90TB of storage in the next two years? If not, I would buy less. I have personally been working with Ceph for two years, but I am not (and never will be) a storage professional at the level of most people on the list here. We all have different professional focus, but the most important thing is putting *something* together and playing with it first. If you plan on eventually buying three SSDs for your kit and what you’ve currently decided on is going to cost $10,000, buying just the SSDs now and three Raspberry Pis is a rounding error for throwaway kit if you decide to work with a different shopping list after getting experience. It may also save you a lot of money if you catch the change earlier than later. Lastly, don’t underestimate learning about all this using KVM or some other virtualizer on your laptop. Especially if you have skills in something like Ansible, deploying to new hardware as you get experience and need is trivial – the scripts you develop will work there too. In-memory networking between VMs is as fast as you can get. Feeling like you want physical devices? Plug them into USB and map them to the VMs. Then start doing things like breaking the network, removing disks and still recovering your data. That’s far more important to know than how to plug together big devices. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to gain this experience. Brian > > On Sun, Oct 4, 2020 at 10:31 AM Brian Topping <brian.topping@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:brian.topping@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote: > Hi Ignacio, apologies I missed your responses here. > > I would agree with Martin about buying used hardware for as cheap as possible, but also understand the desire to have hardware you can promote into future OpenStack usage. > > Regarding networking, I started to use SFP+ cables like https://amzn.to/36sHZo1 <https://amzn.to/36sHZo1>. These run with less energy consumption, so are far cooler, and can be easily swapped out with Fiber or 10GBase-T modules if / when I need them. https://amzn.to/34s6Ohj <https://amzn.to/34s6Ohj> is the switch that I am currently using and will be moving to a SONiC based EdgeCore when I get some time to fix the crashes i’m having in the software. If the motherboards you found are built with 10GBase-T, it may be cheaper now to just stick with that in your switch, but long term, you’ll probably save money going with SFP+, so it’s worth considering. > > Regarding the MikroTik switch, I bought it on price since I thought I was just getting a switch. I turns out the thing is a full-fledged router on the level of a Cisco Catalyst. It has a very complete and mature CLI configuration language, as well as a web UI that is a bit overwhelming at first but very useful once one gets the hang of it. I thought it was something I’d be putting back on eBay pretty rapidly and I ended up growing quite fond of it. > > Regarding bottlenecks, there’s always going to be a bottleneck. Parts are never completely balanced. Spindles still have good characteristics for certain workloads, and I’d say it’s doubtful you’d exceed them with a three node experimentation cluster. The question I’d ask is whether you can use the spindles in a long term solution for things like log storage and backups. If the answer is yes, then having them now will allow you to get a better feel for the differences. It’s a lot easier to discover that way than it is to describe it. (In the old days, this was like people comparing statistics about stereo equipment - today people don’t care about all that, they care about whether they can find the song they want and headphones are more than good enough…) > > Brian > >> On Oct 2, 2020, at 2:03 AM, Ignacio Ocampo <nafiux@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:nafiux@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote: >> >> What about the network cards? The motherboard I’m looking for has 2 x 10Gbe, with that and the CPU frequency, I think the bottleneck will be the HDD. Is that overkill? Thanks! >> >> Ignacio Ocampo >> >>> On 2 Oct 2020, at 0:38, Martin Verges <martin.verges@xxxxxxxx <mailto:martin.verges@xxxxxxxx>> wrote: >>> >>> >>> For private projects, you can search small 1U servers with up to 4 3.5" disk slots and some e3-1230 v3/4/5 cpu. They can be bought for 250-350€ (used) and then you just plug in a disk. >>> They are also good for SATA SSDs and work quite well. You can mix both drives in the same system as well. >>> >>> -- >>> Martin Verges >>> Managing director >>> >>> Mobile: +49 174 9335695 >>> E-Mail: martin.verges@xxxxxxxx <mailto:martin.verges@xxxxxxxx> >>> Chat: https://t.me/MartinVerges <https://t.me/MartinVerges> >>> >>> croit GmbH, Freseniusstr. 31h, 81247 Munich >>> CEO: Martin Verges - VAT-ID: DE310638492 >>> Com. register: Amtsgericht Munich HRB 231263 >>> >>> Web: https://croit.io <https://croit.io/> >>> YouTube: https://goo.gl/PGE1Bx <https://goo.gl/PGE1Bx> >>> >>> >>> Am Fr., 2. Okt. 2020 um 08:32 Uhr schrieb Ignacio Ocampo <nafiux@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:nafiux@xxxxxxxxx>>: >>> Hi Brian, >>> >>> Here more context about what I want to accomplish: I've migrated a bunch of >>> services from AWS to a local server, but having everything in a single >>> server is not safe, and instead of investing in RAID, I would like to start >>> setting up a small Ceph Cluster to have redundancy and a robust mechanism >>> in case any component fails. >>> >>> Also, in the mid-term, I do have plans to deploy a small OpenStack Cluster. >>> >>> Because of that, I would like to set up the first small Ceph Cluster that >>> can scale as my needs grow, the idea is to have 3 OSD nodes with the same >>> characteristics and add additional HDDs as needed, up to 5 HDD per OSD >>> node, starting with 1 HDD per node. >>> >>> Thanks! >>> >>> On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 11:35 AM Brian Topping <brian.topping@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:brian.topping@xxxxxxxxx>> >>> wrote: >>> >>> > Welcome to Ceph! >>> > >>> > I think better questions to start with are “what are your objectives in >>> > your study?” Is it just seeing Ceph run with many disks, or are you trying >>> > to see how much performance you can get out of it with distributed disk? >>> > What is your budget? Do you want to try different combinations of storage >>> > devices to learn how they differ in performance or do you just want to jump >>> > to the fastest things out there? >>> > >>> > One often doesn’t need a bunch of machines to determine that Ceph is a >>> > really versatile and robust solution. I pretty regularly deploy Ceph on a >>> > single node using Kubernetes and Rook. Some would ask “why would one ever >>> > do that, just use direct storage!”. The answer is when I want to expand a >>> > cluster, I am willing to have traded initial performance overhead for >>> > letting Ceph distribute data at a later date. And the overhead is far lower >>> > than one might think when there’s not a network bottleneck to deal with. I >>> > do use direct storage on LVM when I have distributed workloads such as >>> > Kafka that abstract storage that a service instance depends on. It doesn’t >>> > make much sense in my mind for Kafka or Cassandra to use Ceph because I can >>> > afford to lose nodes using those services. >>> > >>> > In other words, Ceph is virtualized storage. You have likely come to it >>> > because your workloads need to be able to come up anywhere on your network >>> > and reach that storage. How do you see those workloads exercising the >>> > capabilities of Ceph? That’s where your interesting use cases come from, >>> > and can help you better decide what the best lab platform is to get started. >>> > >>> > Hope that helps, Brian >>> > >>> > On Sep 29, 2020, at 12:44 AM, Ignacio Ocampo <nafiux@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:nafiux@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote: >>> > >>> > Hi All :), >>> > >>> > I would like to get your feedback about the components below to build a >>> > PoC OSD Node (I will build 3 of these). >>> > >>> > SSD for OS. >>> > NVMe for cache. >>> > HDD for storage. >>> > >>> > The Supermicro motherboard has 2 10Gb cards, and I will use ECC memories. >>> > >>> > <image.png> >>> > >>> > Thanks for your feedback! >>> > >>> > -- >>> > Ignacio Ocampo >>> > >>> > _______________________________________________ >>> > ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@xxxxxxx <mailto:ceph-users@xxxxxxx> >>> > To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@xxxxxxx <mailto:ceph-users-leave@xxxxxxx> >>> > >>> > >>> > >>> >>> -- >>> Ignacio Ocampo >>> _______________________________________________ >>> ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@xxxxxxx <mailto:ceph-users@xxxxxxx> >>> To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@xxxxxxx <mailto:ceph-users-leave@xxxxxxx> > > > > -- > Ignacio Ocampo > _______________________________________________ ceph-users mailing list -- ceph-users@xxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to ceph-users-leave@xxxxxxx
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