On 2012-10-29 13:51, dweimer wrote:
On 2012-10-29 08:29, John Levine wrote:
I'm trying to set up a freebsd image under vmware, but I need more
disk
space than the vmware hosts offer. So the guy who runs the hosting
place
suggests getting a 1U disk server and using iSCSI over gigabit
Ethernet
so I can build zfs volumes from the iSCSI disks.
Poking around, the reports say that FreeBSD is a pretty good iSCSI
server in such forms as freenas, but a lousy iSCSI client, with the
first problem being that that kludges are required to get iSCSI
volumes mounted early enough in the boot process for ZFS to find
them.
Is this still the case in FreeBSD 9?
I'd rather not use NFS, since the remote disks have mysql databases,
and mysql and NFS are not friends.
An alternative is to mount the iSCSI under vmware, so zfs sees them
as
normal disks. Anyone tried that?
TIA,
John
I don't have an answer for you at the moment, but I can tell you that
I just started a new server build this morning with the intent of
using it as an iSCSI client and running ZFS on the drive. In my case
however its going to be a file server that doesn't have very much
heavy I/O, with the intention of using compression on the ZFS file
set. In my case a script ran after start up to mount the drive would
work if it fails. I will let you know what I find out, server is in
the middle of a buildworld to get it updated to the p4 release.
Yes you can mount as a drive through VMware and use ZFS just fine, I
have done a lot of recent tests using ZFS as the boot volume under
VMware. This new server will be my first production server to use
what
I have learned from those tests, as its system drive mounted through
VMware (ESX 4.1) and is booting from ZFS. Once the install of the
buildworld is complete I will add a 150G ZFS data set on our HP
Lefthand Networks SAN, run some tests and let you know the outcome of
them.
Looks like I have some learning to do, system is up and running and
talks to the iscsi volume just fine, however as you mentioned, the big
problem is mounting the volume at start up. can't find any options at
all to launch iscontrol at boot. Found an example /usr/local/etc/rc.d/
script from a mail forum a ways back however it was setup to use UFS
volumes and a secondary fstab file for the iscsi volumes. I don't see
any reason that one can't be made to make use of zfs with the volumes
set with option canmount=noauto and using an rc.conf variable to pass
which volumes to mount at boot, and umount at shutdown to the script.
However, I have some reading to do before I get started, as I haven't
tried to create an rc.d script, and need to get an understanding of how
to properly create one which follows all the proper guidelines, and
allows itself to be a requirement for other scripts. I don't see any
reason it would work successfully to host a MySQL database as the OP was
looking for or a Samba share as I intend to use it as long as their
start up can be set to require the iSCSI start up to run first.
If anyone has already done something similar to this and has some
information to pass on that would be great. I probably won't have time
to even start researching this till Thursday this week
--
Thanks,
Dean E. Weimer
http://www.dweimer.net/
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