Hi everyone, We've building a storage system that should have about 2TB of storage and good sequential write speed. The server side is a Sun X4200 running Solaris 10u4 (plus yesterday's recommended patch cluster), the array we bought is a Transtec Provigo 510 12-disk array. The disks are SATA, and it's connected to the Sun through U320-scsi.
Now the raidbox was sold to us as doing JBOD and various other raid levels, but JBOD turns out to mean 'create a single-disk stripe for every drive'. Which works, after a fashion: When using a 12-drive zfs with raidz and 1 hotspare, I get 132MB/s write performance, with raidz2 it's still 112MB/s. If instead I configure the array as a Raid-50 through the hardware raid controller, I can only manage 72MB/s. So at a first glance, this seems a good case for zfs. Unfortunately, if I then pull a disk from the zfs array, it will keep trying to write to this disk, and will never activate the hot-spare. So a zpool status will then show the pool as 'degraded', one drive marked as unavailable - and the hot-spare still marked as available. Write performance also drops to about 32MB/s. If I then try to activate the hot-spare by hand (zpool replace <broken disk> <hot spare>) the resilvering starts, but never makes it past 10% - it seems to restart all the time. As this box is not in production yet, and I'm the only user on it, I'm 100% sure that there is nothing happening on the zfs filesystem during the resilvering - no reads, writes and certainly no snapshots. In /var/adm/messages, I see this message repeated several times each minute: Nov 12 17:30:52 ddd scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /[EMAIL PROTECTED],0/pci1022,[EMAIL PROTECTED]/pci1000,[EMAIL PROTECTED]/[EMAIL PROTECTED],0 (sd47): Nov 12 17:30:52 ddd offline or reservation conflict Why isn't this enough for zfs to switch over to the hotspare? I've tried disabling (setting to write-thru) the write-cache on the array box, but that didn't make any difference to the behaviour either. I'd appreciate any insights or hints on how to proceed with this - should I even be trying to use zfs in this situation? Regards, Paul Boven. -- Paul Boven <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> +31 (0)521-596547 Unix/Linux/Networking specialist Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe - www.jive.nl VLBI - It's a fringe science _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
