please add some info on system hardware requirements (salt at scale)

[steverweber]

I understand it's tricky to put a number on on this, but I need to have some numbers on what hardware should be used to manage ~1k minions.

a small section like:

• company X is running 1k minions on hardware - 2gb ram 4core VMware
• company X is running 2k minions on hardware - 4gb ram 4core SSD storage mount using noatime
• company X is running 10k minions on hardware Z
• company X is running 20k minions on hardware Z

this would be helpfull in:
http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/intro_scale.html

[rallytime]

Thanks for the request @steverweber. Those would be good parameters to have as a baseline recommendation.

[steverweber]

i would like to have some feedback on this...
we are going to order a system soon and I need to have some baseline.

[rallytime]

@thatch45 @cachedout or @jacksontj are probably the people that could comment on this question the best. Thoughts, guys?

[jacksontj]

Hmm, kind of a difficult question to answer-- since its not only tied to how many minions-- but how many jobs you plan on executing (and how many returns that will generate). In addition you can make a "weaker" master handle more by having the minions configured with a more aggressive backoff. Also these numbers should change fairly dramatically in 2015.2 (with the singleton auth stuff I put in).

We run ~12 core box with ~40gb of ram with ~15k minions-- but its mostly idle unless someone does a heavy job against all 15k minions. I know there are quite a few people that run completely in EC2, so those boxes don't get all that big ;)

If you want to mimic load you can use minionswarm against the single master host and get some benchmarks.

Sorry to avoid the question so much, but I really don't have a great idea of how to pin a number to it :/ I'll see if I can make some time this week (while rolling out 2015.2 internally) to see if I can get some benchmarks that we could work from.

[steverweber]

Thanks. I totally do understand that it's tricky to put a number to something that can be so dynamic.
Your answer was helpful!

[jacksontj]

If its any help, I have single core VMs with 1gb of ram that I do stress testing in-- and the one master (with 10 minions) handles non-stop job execution for days at a time without issue.

[steverweber]

salt is not to painful on resources... so i'm closing this out.
Thanks for the help!