Index

System Requirements

Minimum System Requirements

The following minimum system requirements must be met for SNAP HA™:

2 GB RAM
4 vCPU

AWS Minimum Requirements

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
1 Elastic or Virtual IP address, used to route NAS client traffic across availability zones
2 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
Two 1 GB virtual interfaces on each instance
EBS disks and/or S3 Cloud Disks for each storage controller's local storage

VMware Minimum Requirements

2 SoftNAS storage controller VMs
HA Controller VM is required, with a recommended min. of 500 MB RAM and 1 vCPU
One 1 Gb virtual NIC (shared for admin, replication and HA monitor - not recommended best practice, minimum for demo systems)
Two 1 GbE physical NICs
One or more VMDK virtual disks for 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

Note: SNAP HA relies on time settings in both the primary and secondary instances. It is important to use the same time for each. If an NTP is used, configure both with the same URL.

AWS Requirements

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
3 Virtual IP addresses 1) one used to route NAS client traffic across availability zone. This IP address must be in a separate CIDR block. 2) one for each instance for SoftNAS StorageCenter™ remote administration. Virtual IP setup is recommended.
Alternatively, 3 Elastic IP addresses: 1) one used to route NAS client traffic across availability zones, 2) one each for SoftNAS 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 virtual interfaces on each instance. First interface is used for SoftNAS StorageCenter™ and replication, second interface for Elastic HA IP for NAS traffic
For storage VLAN, choose EC2 instance types for NAS clients and SoftNAS 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 SSDs 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

VMware Requirements
HA Controller VM is required, the recommended minimum is 500MB of RAM and 1vCPU
2 each SoftNAS storage controller VMs
1 each HA Controller VM with 500 MB 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
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
Boot VMware from 32 GB USB, and dedicate disk controller for DirectPath disk I/O
VMDKs for SATA and SAS storage and read cache
Infiniband NIC for data storage pathway