what's the best way to configure a 3.75TB datastore?
Hello List, We're the proud new owner of a 10x750GB appliance. We're going to put OpenBSD on it and I was looking for suggestions or feedback on a configuration we were considering. This server is going to be stored at our colo and we have a point to point T1 directly connected to it. (We're going to initially populate it here and only have to rsync daily differences after hours.) Luca-Brozzi.ad2.com - Partition Size(GB) / 2 swap 8 /usr 4 /usr/local 4 /usr/obj 4 /usr/src 4 /var 2 /home 20 /tmp 2 /backups/server1 400 /backups/server2 400 /backups/server3 400 /backups/server4 400 /backups/server5 400 /backups/server6 400 /backups/server7 400 /backups/server8 400 /backups/server9 400 Is this the best way to do it? Does anyone have suggestions on a better way to do it? Thanks, John
Re: what's the best way to configure a 3.75TB datastore?
On 5/10/07, John Brahy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello List, We're the proud new owner of a 10x750GB appliance. We're going to put OpenBSD on it and I was looking for suggestions or feedback on a configuration we were considering. This server is going to be stored at our colo and we have a point to point T1 directly connected to it. (We're going to initially populate it here and only have to rsync daily differences after hours.) Hi, I believe in using the right tool for the job and, to be honest I wouldn't use OpenBSD for a large data store like that. If it were me I'd get a real SAN or NAS but you have what you have so my top choice would be an OS that you can run an Volume manager on, Linux with LVM2 or Veritas VM. FreeBSD has some Volume Management capabilities but I have no experience using them. Sorry if my answer offends you. Matt
Re: what's the best way to configure a 3.75TB datastore?
On Thu, 10 May 2007 14:21:23 -0500 Matt Bettinger [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/10/07, John Brahy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello List, We're the proud new owner of a 10x750GB appliance. We're going to put OpenBSD on it and I was looking for suggestions or feedback on a configuration we were considering. This server is going to be stored at our colo and we have a point to point T1 directly connected to it. (We're going to initially populate it here and only have to rsync daily differences after hours.) Hi, I believe in using the right tool for the job and, to be honest I wouldn't use OpenBSD for a large data store like that. If it were me I'd get a real SAN or NAS but you have what you have so my top choice would be an OS that you can run an Volume manager on, Linux with LVM2 or Veritas VM. FreeBSD has some Volume Management capabilities but I have no experience using them. Sorry if my answer offends you. Matt I second that, except for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD; I'd really recommend to run, if possible, Solaris and take advantage of ZFS with all its nice tools and features. Btw, can you specify what this appliance is? I have an EMC Cellerra at work which /could/ be used as a highly redundant and nice performing CIFS server (authentication to be done by another machine, though). We found this out after figuring out weeks of how to add a second/third machine to our *cough* RHEL *cough* server infrastructure to get a redundant setup (the file server is connected to another EMC, a 3TByte CX300, using FC) using 'a' cluster filesystem. This turned out to be a real PITA -- and then someone told us that the Cellerra can do this most conveniently. Guess what it is doing right now? It exports a 3TByte NFSv3 FS. gs... To make a long story short: Really THINK VERY HARD on this setup. Once you decided which way you go and store 3TByte of data there (regardless of the way *how* you do it, using GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris or DR-DOS ;) be sure it will be a real PITA to get this corrected IF you have to... timo
Re: what's the best way to configure a 3.75TB datastore?
I believe in using the right tool for the job and, to be honest I wouldn't use OpenBSD for a large data store like that. If it were me I'd get a real SAN or NAS but you have what you have so my top choice would be an OS that you can run an Volume manager on, Linux with LVM2 or Veritas VM. FreeBSD has some Volume Management capabilities but I have no experience using them. Sorry if my answer offends you. I'm inclined to agree here, at least until OpenBSD gets stable ffs2 support (allowing filesystems larger than 1tb), but until then, I'd really recommend going the GNU/Linux or FreeBSD route. Although I'd probably favor GNU/Linux with LVM for a large data store. Jimmy.
Re: what's the best way to configure a 3.75TB datastore?
I'd really recommend to run, if possible, Solaris and take advantage of ZFS with all its nice tools and features. That's a great idea, I always think OpenBSD for everything but I don't want to know how long it would take to fsck 3.75TB. I'm going to go with Solaris w/ZFS. Thanks!
Re: what's the best way to configure a 3.75TB datastore?
On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 12:03:44PM -0700, John Brahy wrote: Hello List, We're the proud new owner of a 10x750GB appliance. We're going to put OpenBSD on it and I was looking for suggestions or feedback on a configuration we were considering. This server is going to be stored at our colo and we have a point to point T1 directly connected to it. (We're going to initially populate it here and only have to rsync daily differences after hours.) Luca-Brozzi.ad2.com - Partition Size(GB) /2 swap 8 /usr 4 /usr/local 4 /usr/obj 4 /usr/src 4 /var 2 /home20 /tmp 2 /backups/server1 400 /backups/server2 400 /backups/server3 400 /backups/server4 400 /backups/server5 400 /backups/server6 400 /backups/server7 400 /backups/server8 400 /backups/server9 400 Is this the best way to do it? Does anyone have suggestions on a better way to do it? It really depends. The volume manager crowd have a point in that a volume manager can make it easier to do this sort of thing (supporting really large filesystems would work as well, but that's still being worked on). However, quite a few backup systems will happily stripe the backups across as many disks as you feed them; AMANDA can certainly do this, although it's not really a good fit for filesystem-based backups. I'd be wary of the 'one disk per server' method you use above, though; that's not likely to be a good map in the future. You might even want to consider mounting ~ 2TB ccds under, say, /disks and symlinking /backups/server1, ... to those, mostly for psychological reasons. You might want to consider various variants on RAID, too. This depends on the uptime requirements, obviously, but if this is the only place you'll store backups, you'll want to make sure a simple disk failure doesn't cause too much trouble. Otherwise, your non-backup directories are ridiculously large, but that's not really going to hurt you in this case, and taking this much storage offline for repartitioning would be painful. Joachim -- PotD: x11/xtraceroute - graphical version of traceroute
