You might find that your better off investing in standard spinning SAS disks but a very good SLOG like the HGST SSD800MH.B, which cost around $800 AUD. The reason being that in a well built SmartOS box, you’ll have ZFS ARC occupying RAM from which a good portion of your database reads should be sourced from and when sync writes do need to be done, the SLOG will help make them more performant. ARC makes read performance exceptional for a cache hit. As for zpool layout, for database workloads your better off with a multi-way mirror (i.e. a pool full of mirror vdevs) as when there is an ARC miss it should be performant (at least won’t incur parity penalties in RAIDZ).
The only things to watch out for if your acquiring new hardware is NIC, HBA and USB compatibility. The best NICs you can have for SmartOS are Intel based ones (be they integrated onto the motherboard or as an add-in card), I’ve not had any issues at all with LSI (now Avago) HBA cards whereas on-board SATA/SAS can be hit and miss unless they are also LSI based (but can be painful to reflesh if needed). The USB compatibility aspect is becoming more important as Illumos doesn’t yet have an appropriate driver which can cause boot issues and rules out keyboard interactions - some boards have the ability to emulate USB2, but some work and some don’t. > On 2 Jul 2016, at 8:45 AM, [email protected] wrote: > > the vendor stated this: > > "Believe me, my programmers all were extremely frustrated when Linux and > Sybase ADS were unreliable." > > i hope that was badly worded; though linux has never been the most reliable > of the unix-like systems, i believe it's on a whole different level from any > version of windows. i was once an MCSE but defected (back) to *nix because i > wanted to get real work done instead of fighting the operating system and > related products. > > thanks for the suggestions thus far - all good stuff, and i really appreciate > the insight and recommendations. i didn't realize joyent provided virtio > drivers - i've been using the ones from fedora for several years on the > windows terminal server (sitting on joyent_20140221T042147Z). > > i have often wondered about running an all-ssd zones pool. the devs all > poo-poo the use of consumer-grade disks, and sata in general. and they have > made great cases for doing so. but for most of my uses, the price and > potential performance looks extremely attractive. i don't usually have the > ability to drop a couple of thousand dollars into a disk subsystem for these > small installations. the customers typically already have enough hardware to > run everything bare-metal, but i've tried hard to virtualize everything for > the many benefits provided by doing so (plus of course the ones specific to > using smartos/zfs). > > ----- On Jul 1, 2016, at 3:23 PM, Humberto Ramirez <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > Ideally it should sit on a SmartOS zone but... I understand he wants to run > the database on top of NTFS...(Vendor requirement) however Sybase ADS its > also available for linux. > > On Jul 1, 2016 2:56 PM, "Joerg Sonnenberger" <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 01, 2016 at 11:15:21AM -0400, Humberto Ramirez wrote: > > - Set "compression": "lz4" "block_size": 131072 (This one can > > only be set at creation) > > I would be careful with setting compression, since it can easily be a > waste of time, depending on the database. > > Joerg > > > http://www.listbox.com <http://www.listbox.com/> > > smartos-discuss | Archives > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/27861131-64318a9b> | > Modify <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> Your Subscription > <http://www.listbox.com/> ------------------------------------------- smartos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/184463/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/184463/25769125-55cfbc00 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=25769125&id_secret=25769125-7688e9fb Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
