> I would like to serve primarily iSCSI from this to a > VMware cluster, and maybe some NFS, although that is > not as important.
Actually NFS would be a much more elegant and simple solution, if your clients are NFS capable, even for example for database workloads (did you know that Oracle has a built-in NFS client/accelerator of her own?) > I think the best approach would be: > > Use both PERC/5E controllers. Good approach. Try to configure MPxIO, so you have load balancing and multipathing over both controllers. See http://docs.sun.com/ for details on how to configure MPxIO. > Setup both MD1000 as JBOD and not use any of the > horrible RAID capabilities Yes, this will give you the best ZFS performance. > Connect all four ports from the PERC/5E's > individually to the MD1000's > Use software RAID (is this raidz?) in Opensolaris and > create some RAID sets RAID-Z. Actually, in your case, it should be RAID-Z2. As to why, read below... > The question then becomes - how many RAID sets - > should I not span the individual ports from the PERCs > to the MD1000's - I believe that port 0 on the MD1000 > addresses drives 1-7, and port 1 addresses 8-15. Good question, and the following might help you: "When to (and not to) use RAID-Z" http://blogs.sun.com/roch/entry/when_to_and_not_to > Anything else that I should be aware of? Yes; As I've written above, you probably should implement RAID-Z2, which is a variation of RAID-Z, but with double parity. You will of course lose one additional drive, but at 400GB a piece, can you really risk being without protection for that long? 400GB takes a while to sync. Ideally, if you can afford it, you should configure RAID-Z2 with a hot spare, so that you can lose a total of three drives before being out of service. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
