Hi, My problem was providing replication for ZFS pools with AVS. I didn't figure out how to find all the physical drives associated with a pool, so first I worked around the issues with the mirror, then I worked around the issue with iSCSI.
Using an iSCSI target mapped to a raid-z pool, I attached to the iscsi initiator to the iscsi target which gave me a device /dev/rdsk/.... Since they are both on the same system, I don't have to worry too much about the iSCSI timeout. The raw device was hooked by AVS for replication. I wasn't using isci for replication, iscsi was being used for creating a single device for AVS to hook. In my own defense, I did say it wasn't pretty or elegant. Zfs does export a raw device for a pool under /dev/zfs/rdsk/.... I attempted to attach AVS to it, but AVS said it couldn't be found. I'll try to find the right contact on the AVS team, maybe its operator error and it really does work. Your absolutely right about AVS not changing direction. AVS is not a cluster, its a recovery product,, back/restore. With AVS it good idea to ensure the file system flushes often or at least the file system supports logging. On non-logging file systems that cache meta data, some of the meta data doesn't hit the disk and doesn't get replicated resulting in out of sync checkpoints. Some file systems need to be quiesced to get a stable checkpoint/snapshot. I find what you are doing very interesting. My understanding DRBD is or has recently been removed from the linux kernel distributions. I'm assuming it's being EOL'd. The replacement for DRBD is replication via device mapper using modules dm_snapshot and dm_replicate. Won't device mapper work for you ? If not, I'm curious to know why. Does it have the same issue for you as AVS ? I think there may be some good news, maybe not, but it looks like someone at sun ported device mapper to OpenSolaris. Here is the link: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/devmapper/ I don't know if it works, I can't imagine its too far off from functional. I can't recommended since I never tried it. I have looked at the source, it looks reasonable. I hope this explains what I was doing. I feel bad for the poor guy who's posting we hijacked... -g -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
