From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Wed Jul 8 20:56:46 2015 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 621EE997800 for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 20:56:46 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from pathiaki2@yahoo.com) Received: from nm28.bullet.mail.bf1.yahoo.com (nm28.bullet.mail.bf1.yahoo.com [98.139.212.187]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA (128/128 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 22EFE3EA9 for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 20:56:45 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from pathiaki2@yahoo.com) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=yahoo.com; s=s2048; t=1436389004; bh=guMVBj3ujkUen1AR1Ham0kQwD5OplifaaPrOpHyNqBg=; h=Date:From:To:Subject:References:In-Reply-To:From:Subject; b=VUATZ1bnCPi68T8jvpTKxkp0F0aWUZFiFl14XCCfole74UDIu7Gsdb6EMuGSDiscaEw9hq2NKFTV1/FAtlMZcX8Pd4Ee9aHZbg3QRZ5Xno8I09sS53onNGhusAGdq3BVdhLdPu0m0XZHgu9cOYtzSkIGwNtxQPvjcIwz4LUhRs5/0YSii6raIeEewcStblSpa22PlrJZDk95o7IXCVkUVO5mBDfhk5tXKFjg0fPicVMh/QYVbZFKn0Afzlz1W5FodKTzcNuP7BGwRvklp65xJmZCamtsDjQMFJCIY0y6NhjhKtXSBWe0WudvhISrGjMckhJn1QqVbZGQ1fXXCvsThw== Received: from [98.139.214.32] by nm28.bullet.mail.bf1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 08 Jul 2015 20:56:44 -0000 Received: from [68.142.230.71] by tm15.bullet.mail.bf1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 08 Jul 2015 20:56:44 -0000 Received: from [127.0.0.1] by smtp228.mail.bf1.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 08 Jul 2015 20:56:44 -0000 X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: 669769.75036.bm@smtp228.mail.bf1.yahoo.com X-Yahoo-Newman-Property: ymail-3 X-YMail-OSG: CLXMWE8VM1kVqan27h4VJjlZs8PYClT.3WEOk7E4Rmv.plU vaw8Dd5Jk.RIbq0jS1ruJI9GVynXT.6k6.gdw8ts.84C3_Ym5A83bBbJgabb 69KkSDZiiOkXEntAH2KvaiiHY8Kc51WaeiQGMA.e4vld44Z1kBSFrp30Ex7M KLXJBVfGwfGbjxg6.1UJfVd60ZCTOhkg24bwNP36hwG4wTw_cppKBBXaA0W1 wPCXRn3ZpaAG25F1y.9si1nslwvCtrfnGslbpBrC6wvHnpue7ww0Toa1ZabM LYvWxxMqqCDSyc9R84Rh1qVGDEC1LWrZgKq7v0rfhdL._vPzqdPSGsBW91aI V7.pSJ5f7WP7T4h3nICYEEAwvPwfxHIEWxYRTodGqhNwXchXsid1ojeGDL_z nWwu22jNFxKBPbuxZd5adAsEm74_fGkCCDRa1sq2dlFvy7Zv4VkR26W7Gs99 gO9hBrt7fHjy60nVffx3m57mo1qHoetB2Ao8hRowGlwUeA7aVXJXK5XQEvTl 1S3D_K.LvZzsI0Hb2e33uQZK9.gm9ul4B X-Yahoo-SMTP: h3Xqg6.swBC0yI913RMMwp94grO_cg-- Message-ID: <559D8E8B.1010806@yahoo.com> Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2015 16:56:43 -0400 From: Paul Pathiakis User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.7.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Gmirror/graid or hardware raid? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2015 20:56:46 -0000 Mario, You may want to even consider using ZFS and jails.... If you're going to run FreeBSD as the VMs, it's probably more efficient to run with jails and ZFS IMHO. Also, you'll be able to create a lot more jails than you have cores as the resources are shared with jails. Turn the PERC card into an HBA/RAID 0 so that all the targets can be seen individually as targets. Then, use ZFS to create two RAID 1 zpools and then stripe them to create a RAID 10 array. This will be extraordinarily fast in disk access. All the RAID calculation will no longer be handled by the CPU on the card but by main CPU cores which are, typically, much faster than what's on a RAID card. Also, with 16 GB of RAM and using jails, your could easily create large amounts of jails, dedicate a large amount of RAM (like 4-8 GB) to the ZFS cache and, basically, almost everything is going to be worked in memory courtesy of FreeBSD and ZFS. I actually had a setup like this with over 50 jails running numerous Web servers. After tuning the kernel to do web serving, making sure ZFS had enough memory, the load was very, very, trivial. Think of jails as a stripped down version of Solaris zones. Very little overhead, very secure and no resource demands outside of what it's using whereas with VMs from a vendor like VMWare or VirtualBox, you have to dedicate at least one core and some amount of disk space and, possibly, other resources. WIth jails, all the jails share one kernel image (separate from the main OS) that is mounted as a nullfs to all of them. They start and consume what they need. The only downside is if you have a runaway process doing something. I have yet to have one after creating hundreds of jails. So, check into ezjail and/or other jail tools. Read the Handbook on the web site and look up jails. It may not be what you want, but from what you presented, you could use them. (Before everyone jumps on me, this is a VERY SIMPLISTIC explanation I know, however, I'd like to think it's accurate for simplicity sake. :-) ) Just trying to help, P. On 07/08/2015 15:49, Mario Lobo wrote: > Hi; > > I'm building a server that is going to host VMs for a small e-commerce > site. It's mainly going to be used for testing new solutions/improving the > current site (on the cloud at this moment) but in the medium to long run, > the idea is to hold the production site in it. > > Since I don't have any experience in running VMs for e-commerce, I don't > know for sure if my plan is correct or even feasible. > > I want to use FBSD 10 as the host OS and the VMs will run under Virtual Box. > > It should be a Dell 430 server (or IBM equivalent) CPU Xeon E5-2630 with 4 > 2T SATA HDs/16 G Ram/ RAID PERC H730 controller (supported by mrsas). > > All VMs will run FBSD also with usual Apache/php/Mysql combination. > > I really would welcome suggestions/opinions on what would be the most > efficient way to set up those HDs to hold these virtual disks. > > I thought about zfs but I won't have lots of RAM avaliable. Should I use > the controller raid? Gmirror/Graid? What raid level? > > Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.