Recommendations on heterogeneous pools

stevewest15

Hi,

Hoping someone here can help me with if I can create a pool from the below hosts without negatively impacting VM stability / live migrations. I read the docs but it seems the doc are missing a link to "see Hosts and resource pools".

Here are my current hosts which are all currently not in a pool:

Host 1: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz
Host 2: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz
Host 3: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6132 CPU @ 2.60GHz
Host 4: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6132 CPU @ 2.60GHz
Host 5: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz
Host 6: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz

Shared NFS storage will be either TrueNAS or Synology depending on which storage offers best performance and VM reliability.

The goal is to build this pool for HA or have two different pools each setup as HA.

Thank You,

SW

tjkreidl

@stevewest15 My understanding is that being able to check CPU masks went away a long time ago and the pool master supposedly automatically deals with all the CPU masking now. If none of these are in production you have not much to lose.
I'd suggest trying it out with the three different hosts and see what happens. Worst case, it won't work.
Caveat: If in a pool and you eject a host, it will lose all the information on its local SR(s).
Also, the Gold 6132 is going to suffer some if it has to be downgraded to work with those lower-end machines. I would in general not advise making pools with hosts that have that wide a disparity in CPU age and capabilities.

stevewest15

@tjkreidl Thank you for your assistance and recommendation!

Andrew

@stevewest15 I would build two homogeneous pools... A high performance production Gold pool and a second Old E5 pool for testing, development, and backup..... unless power and space are a concern then just dump the old E5 monsters since one Gold machine is faster than ALL the old E5 machines combined.

You can warm/cold migrate VMs between pools. If you have a large external dataset then the VM could directly mount NFS storage and use that from any pool/host. That external storage would not be managed by XO (ie. no backups).

While they would be two different pools they can still share backend storage and networks for both SR and NFS storage. You can separate out VMs using VLANs.

stevewest15

@Andrew Thank you that sounds perfect!

splastunov

+1 to @Andrew setup