For optimal cluster performance, observe the following OneFS SmartPools best practices:
- Define a performance and protection profile for each tier and configure each tier accordingly.
- Enable SmartPools Virtual Hot Spare with a minimum of 10 percent space allocation.
- Avoid creating hard links to files, which will cause the file to match different file pool policies.
- If node pools are combined into tiers, target the file pool rules to the tiers rather than specific node pools within the tiers.
- Avoid creating tiers that combine node pools both with and without SSDs.
- Ensure that SSDs consist of a minimum of 2 percent of the total cluster usable capacity, spread across at least 20 percent of the nodes, before enabling GNA.
- Determine if metadata operations for a particular workload are biased towards reads, writes, or an even mix, and select the optimal SmartPools metadata strategy.
- Ensure that node pool and cluster capacity utilization (hard drive and SSD) remains below 90 percent.
- When enabling and using the FilePolicy job, continue running the SmartPools job at a reduced frequency.
- When employing a deep archiving strategy, ensure that the performance pool is optimized for all directories and metadata, and the archive tier for cold files as they age. You can perform this configuration by adding a TYPE=FILE statement to the aging file pool policy rules to only move files to the archive tier.
- If SmartPools takes more than a day to run, or the cluster is already running the FSAnalyze job, consider scheduling the FilePolicy (and corresponding IndexUpdate job) to run daily. Also reduce the frequency of the SmartPools job to monthly.