Membase storage question
Mon, 07/11/2011 - 13:54
Do have any guidance on allocating storage to membase servers when running in a virtual environment? We typically use SAN storage in LUNs that are shared across multiple virtual hosts and virtual servers. When deploying membase buckets we are concerned about occasional heavy disk IO which may impact other non-membase VMs using the same storage; membase is tolerant of 100% disk utilization but other applications are not. Would you recommend using dedicated storage to be shared by multiple membase VMs or perhaps dedicated to a single membase VM? We are looking for whatever guidance you have on provisioning storage for virtual environments.
Hey John, happy to try and provide some guidance here. We would recommend each Membase VM to have it's own storage, there really isn't any benefit to sharing storage across multiple Membase nodes.
Membase is fairly light on writing to disk, but can be quite heavy reading during rebalance and recovery operations. If you're seeing an impact on non-Membase VM's, it would definitely be a good idea to segregate those from Membase.
Perhaps posting on the forums of those "other" applications asking them to be more tolerant of heavy disk usage ;-)
Also, if possible, you can use more "ephemeral" storage for the Membase nodes provided you take regular backups. Membase's primary defense against failure is off-node replication, so if a single node dies you won't really need it's data files anymore anyway. A more catastrophic, multi-node failure (or restoration to a point-in-time) can be done via the regularly backed up files if need be.
Hope that helps, let me know how we can clarify further.
Perry
Forum support is great for free but sometimes you need a guaranteed response time and dedicated resources for your questions or issues.
Consider purchasing enterprise-level support from Couchbase: http://www.couchbase.com/products-and-services/overview
Call or email "sales -at- couchbase-dot- com" today!