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Recommended processor for ZFS head node?

madilyn

n00b
Joined
Feb 20, 2014
Messages
17
I am assembling a pair of ZFS head nodes, that will serve a small 128+ core cluster consisting of about 8-12 servers.

The head nodes will serve 1 RAIDZ-2 zpool (roughly 60 disks = 240 TB raw disk space) and 1 three-way mirror zpool (roughly 18 disks = 10 TB) in active/passive redundancy and I have vanilla settings except the zlib compression is enabled.

Is there a Xeon E5-2XXX processor that is recommended for my build? I don't know if I will be CPU-bound or if ZFS benefits from higher clock speeds or number of cores.

Thanks!
~maddie
 
If there are a lot of clients, I'd say more cores is better than faster cores...
 
I would say, faster cores are more valuable.

But with gzip compression enabled, just raw ghz speed matter, so whatever cpu gives you higher ghz total, I would suggest.
 
@dan and patrick

Thanks so much for your input. Now that I think about it, the Xeon E5-2643v2 and E5-2637v2 are the perfect processors for the build. This seems to be the descending order of best processors for a ZFS build. The E5-2637v2 pricing pretty much makes the E5-2643 obsolete, while the E5-2637 is currently priced badly. Considering benchmark score/cost, the E5-2643 v2 is also not an attractive proposition.

Now if only they more stock of these somewhere.

DESCENDING ORDER OF PREFERENCE
Processor (cost, benchmark score)
E5-2637v2 ($1030.89, ?)
E5-2643 v2 ($1600.45, 9751)
E5-2643 ($854.99, 8508)
E5-2637 ($876, ?)
 
He did say 'will serve', so I'm guessing this is planned, not current. That said, he doesn't say they are all in one vdev (I certainly hope not!)
 
But he also says 1 3way mirror of 18 disks, so that is really a 5vdev 3way mirror.

So likely the same deal on the raidz2, just dunno how many.
 
Makes sense - just the wording caught me off-guard. Multiple RAIDz2 VDEVS in a single pool would be called, what, a RAIDz2-0? What's the proper terminology?
 
I don't think there is a term, per-se. It is discouraged to mix different geometries so they likely never bothered to make a term up.
 
@drescherjm, raiderj, drescherjm

Yes, a zpool really just implies a stripe across multiple vdevs, so I meant a zpool of multiple (I'm planning on 6 per vdev but haven't benchmarked) RAIDZ-2 vdevs and a zpool of 6 three-way mirror vdevs.
 
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