-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Trial x4500, zfs with NFS and quotas.
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:46:33 +0900
From: Jorgen Lundman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
Hello list;
We are users of NetApps, currently needing to expand. We thought to try
a x4500 since Jonathan suggested it might be better/cheaper. Sun very
kindly shipped us a trial x4500 unit, even though we are in Tokyo. We
probably are not as big a company as Sun is used to, and would only buy
two x4500 this cycle, but it would be nice to get some questions answered.
The version of Solaris (zfs) that the x4500 was shipped with, was very
old and painfully slow, so I installed the latest OpenSolaris I could
find during my trials.
Solaris Express Developer Edition 9/07 snv_70b X86
SunOS x4500.unix 5.11 snv_70b i86pc i386 i86pc
The legacy setup on current NetApps are in the style of:
/export/mail/m/e/0/0/meNNNNN00/
/export/mail/m/e/0/1/meNNNNN01/
. .
/export/mail/m/e/9/9/meNNNNN99/
Each user has a quota. I have used 30M during my tests, but it really
would differ in real life.
The smallest volume we have on the NetApp (/export/mail/) has 194172 users.
*** NFS Option
Start:
Since we need quota per user, I need to create a file-system of
size=$quota for each user.
But NFS will not let you cross mount-point/file-systems so mounting just
"/export/mail/" means I will not see any directory below that.
(I don't suppose there is some hack to let me cross file-systems?)
***
On the NFS client side, this would mean I would have to do 194172 NFS
mounts to see my file-system. Can normal Unix servers even do this? That
just is not very realistic. This would cut out many old systems, and
probably some Unix flavours.
***
From Googling, it seems suggested that I use automount, which would cut
out any version of Unix without automount, either from the age of the OS
(early Sun might be ok still?) and Unix flavours without automount.
So I would have to migrate the entire system to be 100% Sun, today and
"forever". Not exactly ideal. I'm sure Sun would be very happy with such
a commitment, but that just is not feasible right now.
***
Alright, let's try automount. It seems it does not really do
/export/mail/m/e/X/Y very well, so I would have to list 0/0 -> 9/9 each,
so 100 lines in automount. Probably that would be possible, just not
very attractive.
* /export/mail/m/e/0/0/&
. .
* /export/mail/m/e/9/9/&
*** nfsv4
There were some noise about future support that will let you cross
file-systems to nfsv4 (mirror mounts). But this doesn't seem to exist
right now. It would also cut out any old systems, and any Unix flavour
that does not yet do nfsv4 and mirror mounts.
*** iscsi?
Could I share the zpool with iscsi, use ufs with ufs-quotas? But I am
then limited to any OS with iscsi, and ufs. Could this even do multiple
writers?
*** software quotas?
Probably the only realistic option for zfs/x4500 at this time. It is
"most likely" that we can do software quota with the specific software
we are wanting to use, but we would always have to look out for smart
people getting around it, software bugs etc.
***
Answer: x4500 can not replace NetApp in our setup.
We would either have to go without quotas, or, cut out any old Unix
server versions, or non-Solaris Unix flavours. x4500 is simply not a
real NFS server (because we want quotas).
Ironically, this would probably work if we used Samba, as it doesn't
care about file-systems.
Please tell me I am wrong. I really wanted this to work, as the price
per GB is quite attractive. Also, zfs is very neat.
--
Jorgen Lundman | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Unix Administrator | +81 (0)3 -5456-2687 ext 1017 (work)
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo | +81 (0)90-5578-8500 (cell)
Japan | +81 (0)3 -3375-1767 (home)
--
Jorgen Lundman | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Unix Administrator | +81 (0)3 -5456-2687 ext 1017 (work)
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo | +81 (0)90-5578-8500 (cell)
Japan | +81 (0)3 -3375-1767 (home)
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