[gpfsug-discuss] Manager nodes

Buterbaugh, Kevin L Kevin.Buterbaugh at Vanderbilt.Edu
Tue Jan 24 15:18:09 GMT 2017


Hi Simon,

FWIW, we have two servers dedicated to cluster and filesystem management functions (and 8 NSD servers).  I guess you would describe our cluster as small to medium sized … ~700 nodes and a little over 1 PB of storage.

Our two managers have 2 quad core (3 GHz) CPU’s and 64 GB RAM.  They’ve got 10 GbE, but we don’t use IB anywhere.  We have an 8 Gb FC SAN and we do have them connected in to the SAN so that they don’t have to ask the NSD servers to do any I/O for them.

I do collect statistics on all the servers and plunk them into an RRDtool database.  Looking at the last 30 days the load average on the two managers is in the 5-10 range.  Memory utilization seems to be almost entirely dependent on how parameters like the pagepool are set on them.

HTHAL…

Kevin

> On Jan 24, 2017, at 4:00 AM, Simon Thompson (Research Computing - IT Services) <S.J.Thompson at bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> We are looking at moving manager processes off our NSD nodes and on to
> dedicated quorum/manager nodes.
> 
> Are there some broad recommended hardware specs for the function of these
> nodes.
> 
> I assume they benefit from having high memory (for some value of high,
> probably a function of number of clients, files, expected open files?, and
> probably completely incalculable, so some empirical evidence may be useful
> here?) (I'm going to ignore the docs that say you should have twice as
> much swap as RAM!)
> 
> What about cores, do they benefit from high core counts or high clock
> rates? For example would I benefit more form a high core count, low clock
> speed, or going for higher clock speeds and reducing core count? Or is
> memory bandwidth more important for manager nodes?
> 
> Connectivity, does token management run over IB or only over
> Ethernet/admin network? I.e. Should I bother adding IB cards, or just have
> fast Ethernet on them (my clients/NSDs all have IB).
> 
> I'm looking for some hints on what I would most benefit in investing in vs
> keeping to budget.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Simon
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gpfsug-discuss mailing list
> gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org
> http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss



More information about the gpfsug-discuss mailing list