Need opinion with our current setup

Diogo Jesus · April 3, 2019

Hello everyone,

I'm a junior sysadmin and currently the only sysadmin in our company so I feel like asking to someone who is way more experienced than me.

Currently we own a production / development server with the current specs:

8 x AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 4386 (1 Socket)
32Go RAM DDR3
2x3To HDD

This server has proxmox installed in ZFS which has been working great for the past year and a half.

This server currently hosts 16 LXC containers with different services on it. (We decided to proceed with LXC because we were never able to correctly setup a VM... Wondering if it's not a CPU limitation... But this server was already here when I arrived).

These 16 LXC containers have all kind of different services installed. Web server, mail server, AS2 Message transfer, MySQL servers, PostgreSQL servers, VPN, for development and production and so on.

Last week the company decided to acquire a second server with the current specs:

8 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1630 v3 @ 3.70GHz (1 Socket)
64Go RAM DDR4
2x480Go SSD

So with this server I thought it was a good idea to split some services from the current server to this new server. Since our CPU runs at 50% full time and our ram around 70%

The services that I thought to migrate were the DB Servers (MySQL/PostgreSQL), AS2 Message transfer (Java application) and a webserver with our clients panel which are the most important containers.

Problem is that with this 2x480Go SSD running in ZFS mirror we can only use 480Go of disk space.

Currently we have around 200Go of used data in these LXC containers that I plan to migrate. Is this still a good option? Since our data will increase with the time?

The servers are hosted at SoYouStart (OVH) So we cannot just add more disk space to the servers.

Like I said I'm just a junior sysadmin so I feel kinda lost at the moment, I don't know if I should proceed like this or if there's a better way to proceed.

Thank you,

DogKnight · April 5, 2019

I think some more historical information is needed to make a decision.

What I mean by that is storage usage rates over time. Yes, they take up 200gb currently, but what were they at 1.5 years ago? If they were at 180gb and you've had 20gb of growth over that period, then you should be fine.

However if they have increased at a rate of 100gb a year, and that level of growth is expected to continue or increase, then it's likely not a good idea.

And while it may not be a simple task to increase storage, it is obviously possible. So try work out the feasibility of adding more storage in 1-2 years time to cope with storage demands.

Just to make you aware, I am not a sysadmin. Rather I work in I.T Security, but similar aspects come into play when sizing appliances for customers.

Diogo Jesus · April 5, 2019

1 hour ago, DogKnight said:

I think some more historical information is needed to make a decision.

What I mean by that is storage usage rates over time. Yes, they take up 200gb currently, but what were they at 1.5 years ago? If they were at 180gb and you've had 20gb of growth over that period, then you should be fine.

However if they have increased at a rate of 100gb a year, and that level of growth is expected to continue or increase, then it's likely not a good idea.

And while it may not be a simple task to increase storage, it is obviously possible. So try work out the feasibility of adding more storage in 1-2 years time to cope with storage demands.

Just to make you aware, I am not a sysadmin. Rather I work in I.T Security, but similar aspects come into play when sizing appliances for customers.

Hello,

Thank you for your opinion, regarding the data, we got our server back when I started working here, 1 year and a half. so these 200Gb of disk space were taken during this time. As we're storing a lot of client informations (electricity consumption data), this value will increase over time. Plus if we get new clients. Back then the data was taken in paper, but because of law changement this data had to become virtual, and we coulnd't store more paper data...

The idea that I got was to get the front end applications with the database stored on the SSD, because even if we're only around 200GB of data, we have millions of rows in our Database concerning client information and daily consumption (15 in 15 minutes to be exact). Some queries just take over 20 seconds to show up, so I thought maybe moving the most important ones to the SSD would be a win.

We currently cannot add more storage because of how SoYouStart works, basicly they rent servers where they do 0 management and because of that they're pretty cheap. But they do not give the option to add more data or just to edit the actual server. If we want more data, that means a new server... Maybe in the future we might go out form then and rent a rack on a datacenter where we can put our own server. That way it could be easier to manage the actual server.

I will keep working on this, because I want this new server in production by monday, so I guess i'll just update this thread for historic search in the future, it might be interesting for others aswell.

Thank you,