Caution: I built a system like this and spent several weeks trying to get iscsi share working under Solaris 10 u6 and older. It would work fine for the first few hours but then performance would start to degrade, eventually becoming so poor as to actually cause panics on the iscsi initiator boxes. Couldn't find resolution through the various Solaris knowledge bases. Closest I got was to find out that there's a problem only in the *Solaris 10* iscsi target code that incorrectly frobs some counter when it shouldn't, violating the iscsi target specifications. The problem is fixed in Nevada/OpenSolaris.
Long story short, I tried OpenSolaris 2008.11 and the iscsi crashes ceased and things ran smoothly. Not the solution I was hoping for, since this was to eventually be a prod box, but then Sun announced that I could purchase OpenSolaris support, so I was covered. On OS, my two big filers have been running really nicely for months and months now. Don't try to use Solaris 10 as a filer OS unless you can identify and resolve the iscsi target issue. On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Scott Lawson <scott.law...@manukau.ac.nz> wrote: > > > Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> I recommended a ZFS-based archive solution to a client needing to have >> a network-based archive of 15TB of data in a remote datacentre. I >> based this on an X2200 + J4400, Solaris 10 + rsync. >> >> This was enthusiastically received, to the extent that the client is >> now requesting that their live system (15TB data on cheap SAN and >> Linux LVM) be replaced with a ZFS-based system. >> >> The catch is that they're not ready to move their production systems >> off Linux - so web, db and app layer will all still be on RHEL 5. >> > > At some point I am sure you will convince them to see the light! ;) >> >> As I see it, if they want to benefit from ZFS at the storage layer, >> the obvious solution would be a NAS system, such as a 7210, or >> something buillt from a JBOD and a head node that does something >> similar. The 7210 is out of budget - and I'm not quite sure how it >> presents its storage - is it NFS/CIFS? > > The 7000 series devices can present NFS, CIFS and iSCSI. Looks very nice if > you need > a nice Gui / Don't know command line / need nice analytics. I had a play > with one the other > day and am hoping to get my mit's on one shortly for testing. I would like > to give it a real > gd crack with VMWare for VDI VM's. >> >> If so, presumably it would be >> relatively easy to build something equivalent, but without the >> (awesome) interface. >> > > For sure the above gear would be fine for that. If you use standard Solaris > 10 10/08 you have > NFS and iSCSI ability directly in the OS and also available to be supported > via a support contract > if needed. Best bet would probably be NFS for the Linux machines, but you > would need > to test in *their* environment with *their* workload. >> >> The interesting alternative is to set up Comstar on SXCE, create >> zpools and volumes, and make these available either over a fibre >> infrastructure, or iSCSI. I'm quite excited by this as a solution, >> but I'm not sure if it's really production ready. >> > > If you want fibre channel target then you will need to use OpenSolaris or > SXDE I believe. It's > not available in mainstream Solaris yet. I am personally waiting till then > when it has been > *well* tested in the bleeding edge community. I have too much data to take > big risks with it. >> >> What other options are there, and what advice/experience can you share? >> > > I do very similar stuff here with J4500's and T2K's for compliance archives, > NFS and iSCSI targets > for Windows machines. Works fine for me. Biggest system is 48TB on J4500 for > Veritas Netbackup > DDT staging volumes. Very good throughput indeed. Perfect in fact, based on > the large files that > are created in this environment. One of these J4500's can keep 4 LTO4 drives > in a SL500 saturated with > data on a T5220. (4 streams at ~160 MB/sec) > > I think you have pretty much the right idea though. Certainly if you use Sun > kit you will be able to deliver > a commercially supported solution for them. >> _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
