In a new post from antirez directly addressing your scenario, he suggests starting with a fixed but large number of shard instances on the same machine, then mi

In a new post from antirez directly addressing your scenario, he suggests starting with a fixed but large number of shard instances on the same machine, then migrating the instances off to other machines using master / slave replication as needed. http://antirez.com/post/redis-presharding.html http://antirez.com/post/redis-presharding.html