On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 8:09 AM, David Magda <dma...@ee.ryerson.ca> wrote: > You could always split things up into groups of (say) 50. A few jobs ago, > I was in an environment where we have a /home/students1/ and > /home/students2/, along with a separate faculty/ (using Solaris and UFS). > This had more to do with IOps than anything else.
A decade or so ago when I managed similar environments and had (I think) 6 file systems handling about 5000 students. Each file system had about 1/6 of the students. Challenges I found in this were: - Students needed to work on projects together. The typical way to do this was for them to request a group, then create a group writable directory in one of their home directories. If all students in the group had home directories on the same file system, there was nothing special to consider. If they were on different file systems then at least one would need to have a non-zero quota (that is, not 0 blocks soft, 1 block hard) quota on the file system where the group directory resides. - Despite your best efforts things will get imbalanced. If you are tight on space, this means that you will need to migrate users. This will become apparent only at the times of the semester where even per-user outages are most inconvenient (i.e. at 6 and 13 weeks when big projects tend to be due). Its probably a good idea to consider these types of situations in the transition plan, or at least determine they don't apply. I was working in a college of engineering where group projects were common and CAD, EDA, and simulation tools could generate big files very quickly. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
