4:37 p.m.
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Hello
I just wanted to share a scenario with you and perhaps exchange more
information with other people that may also have a similar scenario.
For a couple of months I have been running a oVirt Node (CentOS 7.3
Minimal) with bcache (https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/) for caching a
SSD with HDD disks. The setup is simple and was made for a prof of
concept and since them has been working better than expected.
This is a standalone host with 4 disks being: 1 for Operating System, 2
x 2TB 7200 RPM in software RAID 1 and 1 x PCI-E NVMe 400GB SSD which
plays the caching device for both reads and writes. The VM storage
folder is mounted as a ext4 partition on the logical device created by
bcache (/dev/bcache0). All this is transparent to oVirt as all it sees
is a /folder to put the VMs.
We monitor the IOPS on all block devices individually and see the
behavior exactly as expected: random writes are all done on the SSD
first and them streamed sequentially to the mechanical drives with
pretty impressive performance. Also in the beginning while the total
amount of data was less than 400GB ALL read used to come from the
caching device and therefore didn't use IOPS from the mechanical drives
leaving it free to do basically writes. Finally at sequential IOPS (as
described by bcache) are intelligently passed directly to the mechanical
drives (but they are not much).
Although bcache is present on kernel 3.10 I had to use kernel-ml 4.12
(from Elrepo) and I had also to compile the bcache-tools as I could not
find it available in any repository.
Regards
Fernando
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<font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Hello<br>
<br>
I just wanted to share a scenario with you and perhaps exchange
more information with other people that may also have a similar
scenario.<br>
<br>
For a couple of months I have been running a oVirt Node (CentOS
7.3 Minimal) with bcache (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/">https://bcache.evil...>)
for
caching a SSD with HDD disks. The setup is simple and was made for
a prof of concept and since them has been working better than
expected.<br>
This is a standalone host with 4 disks being: 1 for Operating
System, 2 x 2TB 7200 RPM in software RAID 1 and 1 x PCI-E NVMe
400GB SSD which plays the caching device for both reads and
writes. The VM storage folder is mounted as a ext4 partition on
the logical device created by bcache (/dev/bcache0). All this is
transparent to oVirt as all it sees is a /folder to put the VMs.<br>
<br>
We monitor the IOPS on all block devices individually and see the
behavior exactly as expected: random writes are all done on the
SSD first and them streamed sequentially to the mechanical drives
with pretty impressive performance. Also in the beginning while
the total amount of data was less than 400GB ALL read used to come
from the caching device and therefore didn't use IOPS from the
mechanical drives leaving it free to do basically writes. Finally
at sequential IOPS (as described by bcache) are intelligently
passed directly to the mechanical drives (but they are not much).<br>
<br>
Although bcache is present on kernel 3.10 I had to use kernel-ml
4.12 (from Elrepo) and I had also to compile the bcache-tools as I
could not find it available in any repository.<br>
<br>
Regards<br>
Fernando<br>
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