The following minimum system requirements must be met for SNAP HA:
1 GB RAM
4 vCPU
VMware and Hyper-V Minimum Requirements
2 each SoftNAS storage controller VM's
Optional HA Controller VM (recommended), with min. of 500 GB RAM and 1 vCPU
1 each 1 Gb virtual NIC (shared for admin, replication and HA monitor - not recommended best practice, minimum for demo systems)
2 each 1 GbE physical NICs
One of more VMDK virtual disks for storage
AWS Minimum Requirements
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
1 each Elastic IP address used to route NAS client traffic across availability zones
2 each SoftNAS storage controller EC2 instances (note: micro instance is not compatible, with only 640 MB RAM)
Amazon S3 storage (2 MB of S3 storage will be allocated in same region as EC2 instances
2 each 1 Gb virtual interfaces on each instance
EBS disks and/or S3 Cloud Disks for each storage controller's local storage
Recommended Configurations
The following configurations are recommended best practices for SoftNAS SNAP HA:
8 to 64 GB RAM
4 vCPU (8 vCPU if volume data compression will be used extensively)
SSD for read cache and write log
Separate replication and storage traffic to dedicated physical networks
VMware and Hyper-V Recommended Requirements
2 each SoftNAS storage controller VM's
1 each HA Controller VM with 500 GB RAM and 1 vCPU configured to use VMware FT (fault-tolerance) to ensure HA Controller is always available
3 each virtual NICs - separate vNIC and VLAN allocated to: 1) SoftNAS StorageCenter administration (E1000), 2) SnapReplicate block replication (E1000), 3) storage VLAN (VMXNet3)
For storage VLAN, configure for MTU 9000 (required for 10 GbE maximum throughput)
DirectPath pass-through disk controller providing direct disk access (requires Intel VT-d and disk controller supported by CentOS). This is required for best small block 4K/8K I/O and synchronous write-log and read cache performance with VMware
Separate disk controllers for 1) booting VMware from RAID-1 mirrored disks and 2) storage I/O
Optionally, boot VMware from 32 GB USB, and dedicate disk controller for DirectPath disk I/O
(Optional) VMDK's for SATA and SAS storage and read cache
4 each 10 GbE or 1 GbE physical NICS (2 active/active for VMware host management and SoftNAS administration and replication, 2 active/active for data storage)
Optional Infiniband NIC for data storage pathway
AWS Recommended Requirements
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
3 each Elastic IP address: 1) used to route NAS client traffic across availability zones, 2) one each for StorageCenter remote administration
Alternatively, use a VPC with private VPN access to SoftNAS StorageCenter for administration, with 1 Elastic IP address for NAS client traffic
2 each SoftNAS storage controller EC2 instances (note: micro instance is not compatible, with only 640 MB RAM)
Amazon S3 storage (2 MB of S3 storage will be allocated in same region as EC2 instances
2 each virtual interfaces on each instance. First interface is used for StorageCenter and replication, second interface for Elastic HA IP for NAS traffic
For storage VLAN, choose EC2 instance types for NAS clients and StorageCenter that support MTU 9000 (required for 10 GbE maximum throughput)
EBS disks and/or S3 Cloud Disks for each storage controller's local storage
For highest throughput, use HVM instances with local, ephemeral SSD's for read cache, high-IOPS EBS volume (SSD) for write log and EC2 instances with 10 GbE network interfaces
Use EBS volumes for primary storage in RAIDZ-2 configuration for best data density and RAID-10 with high-IOPS EBS volumes for best IOPS in database and transactional applications
Use S3 disks for lower IOPS, highly-redundant mass-storage up to 4 PB per S3 disk device
