SmartStore - The home path and cold path of each index must point to the same partition.

[patng_nw]

In https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.7/Indexer/AboutSmartStore, there is a statement saying that "The home path and cold path of each index must point to the same partition."

I am considering migrating some of the indexes in my clustered indexers to SmartStore.  However, most of my indexes have their home path on an SSD partition, with the cold path on a HDD partition.   With the statement above, does it mean that I cannot migrate them to SmartStore?

[patng_nw]

@scelikok 

Thanks a lot.  It makes sense.  But then what does the statement "The home path and cold path of each index must point to the same partition." in the doc really mean?

[scelikok · Accepted solution]

This is for new index definitions. SmartStore depends on CacheManager to download required data from S3 to local fast storage which is hot. Since there is no warm or cold anymore, all data should be on the fastest local disk for performance. 

On migration cases, since it is not easy to make hot  and cold path the same, system supports cold data migration by keeping the path information.

I hope this helps, of course you should test the migration on test system before production.

[patng_nw]

That's very clear now.  Thanks a lot!

[scelikok]

I appreciate if you can upvode.

[scelikok]

@patng_nw, you can migrate them. Migration will move all warm and cold data to SmartStore. Only difference cold data will be fetched to cold path location. 

You can see below from documentation;

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.7/Indexer/MigratetoSmartStore 
In all respects, cold buckets are functionally equivalent to warm buckets. The cache manager manages the migrated cold buckets in the same way that it manages warm buckets. The only difference is that the cold buckets will be fetched into the cold path location, rather than the home path location.