Re[4]: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS
Hello Nicholas, Tuesday, February 20, 2007, 12:55:05 AM, you wrote: On 2/19/07,Robert Milkowski[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 5. there's no simple answer to this question as it greatly depends on workload and data. One thing you should keep in mind - Solaris *has* to boot in a 64bit mode if you wan to use all that memory as a cache for zfs, so old x86 32bit CPU are not welcome Any rules of thumb? ie 512Mb or 1024Mb per TB? Really there's none - it's so heavily dependent on data and workload that someimes 512MB per TB would be even an overkill, sometimes the difference between 4GB and 16GB is hard to notice, etc. Generally if you can afford buy more memory. Or if you can check different setups then try them. Perhaps buy 2-4GB in such dimms so there're still free ones so you can easily add another dimms. -- Best regards, Robert mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://milek.blogspot.com ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re[2]: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS
Hello Nicholas, Monday, February 19, 2007, 11:31:50 AM, you wrote: 2. What is the recommended version of Opensolaris to use at the moment that has iscsi? Is there a stable-like branch or is it better to stay on the N-1 update? 3. Which leads to: coming from Debian, how easy is system updates? I remember with OpenBSD system updates used to be a pain. 4. I assume that since Solaris can't boot off zfs yet, that the best option is two mirrored drives for the OS, and all the other drives in the pool. 5. Is there a recommended amount of system memory for (only) serving storage? ie. is 4Gb sufficient for 10x500Gb SATA array, or will increasing this make a big difference to performance. How about CPU? Would 2 Xeon 5130s be sufficient for 20-40 iSCSI targets? 2. if you are talking about iSCSI client it's in a Solaris 10 release. IIRC correctly iSCSI server should be in U4 - otherwise use Nevada 3. you have to options to upgrade system - via patches or via upgrade. both are fairly easy 4. that's what a lot of people are doing now. However even with zfsboot code I guess lot of people will still mirror two drives for a system (but with zfs) and create separate pool for all the other disks 5. there's no simple answer to this question as it greatly depends on workload and data. One thing you should keep in mind - Solaris *has* to boot in a 64bit mode if you wan to use all that memory as a cache for zfs, so old x86 32bit CPU are not welcome -- Best regards, Robert mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://milek.blogspot.com ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS
Hi Nicholas, Actually Virtual Iron, they have a nice system at the moment with live migration of windows guest. Ah. We looked at them for some Windows DR. They do have a nice product. 3. Which leads to: coming from Debian, how easy is system updates? I remember with OpenBSD system updates used to be a pain. Not a pain, but coming from Debian/Gentoo not great either. Packaging is one of the last areas that Solaris really needs an upgrade. You might want to take a look at Nexenta, which is OpenSolaris with GNU userland and apt-get. Works pretty well. Once installed you can update it to Build 56 to get the iSCSI target. -J ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS
On 2/20/07, Jason J. W. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ah. We looked at them for some Windows DR. They do have a nice product. Just waiting for them to get iscsi and vlan support. Supposely sometime in the next couple months. Combined with zfs/iscsi it will make a very nice small data center solution. Not a pain, but coming from Debian/Gentoo not great either. Packaging is one of the last areas that Solaris really needs an upgrade. You might want to take a look at Nexenta, which is OpenSolaris with GNU userland and apt-get. Works pretty well. Once installed you can update it to Build 56 to get the iSCSI target. I've thought about this. How stable is it for just serving (iscsi/nfs/cifs) storage? What about when Zones are added with a db (pgdb, mydb) instance? Nicholas ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: Re[2]: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS
On 2/19/07, Robert Milkowski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 5. there's no simple answer to this question as it greatly depends on workload and data. One thing you should keep in mind - Solaris *has* to boot in a 64bit mode if you wan to use all that memory as a cache for zfs, so old x86 32bit CPU are not welcome Any rules of thumb? ie 512Mb or 1024Mb per TB? Nicholas ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
[zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS
Is there a best practice guide for using zfs as a basic rackable small storage solution? I'm considering zfs with a 2U 12 disk Xeon based server system vs something like a second hand FAS250. Target enviroment is mixature of Xen or VI hosts via iSCSI and nfs/cifs. Being able to take snapshots of running (or maybe paused) xen iscsi vols and re-export then for cloning and remote backup replication is important. the aspect I like about zfs is the offsite storage system can also be generic hardware and thus much cheaper. Being able to run a postgresql or mysql directly on the storage server has was postives as well, although a generic storage appliance has a better admin profile. Some questions: 1. how stable is zfs? i'm tolarent to some sweat work to fix problems but data loss is unacceptable 2. If drives need to be pulled and put into a new chasis does zfs handle them having new device names and being out of order? 3. Is it possible to hot swap drives with raidz(2) 4. How does performance compare with 'brand name' storage systems? Thanks Nicholas ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS
Hi Nicholas, ZFS itself is very stable and very effective as fast FS in our experience. If you browse the archives of the list you'll see that NFS performance is pretty acceptable, with some performance/RAM quirks around small files: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?threadID=19858 http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=18394 To my understanding the iSCSI driver is undergoing significant performance improvements...maybe someone close to this can help? If by VI you are referring to VMware Infrastructure...you won't get any support from VMware if you're using the iSCSI target on Solaris as its not approved by them. Not that this is really a problem in my experience as VMware tech support is pretty terrible anyway. Some questions: 1. how stable is zfs? i'm tolarent to some sweat work to fix problems but data loss is unacceptable We haven't experienced any data loss, and have had some pretty nasty things thrown at it (FC array rebooted unexpectedly). 2. If drives need to be pulled and put into a new chasis does zfs handle them having new device names and being out of order? My understanding and experience here is yes. It'll read the ZFS lables off the drives/slice. 3. Is it possible to hot swap drives with raidz(2) Depends on your underlying hardware. To my knowledge hot-swapping is not dependent on the RAID-level at all. 4. How does performance compare with 'brand name' storage systems? No clue if you're referring to NetApp. Does anyone else know? -J ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
