Re: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS

2007-02-19 Thread Jason J. W. Williams

Hi Nicholas,


Actually Virtual Iron, they have a nice system at the moment with live
migration of windows guest.


Ah. We looked at them for some Windows DR. They do have a nice product.


3. Which leads to: coming from Debian, how easy is system updates?  I
remember with OpenBSD system updates used to be a pain.


Not a pain, but coming from Debian/Gentoo not great either. Packaging
is one of the last areas that Solaris really needs an upgrade. You
might want to take a look at Nexenta, which is OpenSolaris with GNU
userland and apt-get. Works pretty well. Once installed you can update
it to Build 56 to get the iSCSI target.

-J
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS

2007-02-19 Thread Nicholas Lee

On 2/20/07, Jason J. W. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:



Ah. We looked at them for some Windows DR. They do have a nice product.



Just waiting for them to get iscsi and vlan support. Supposely sometime in
the next couple months.  Combined with zfs/iscsi it will make a very nice
small data center solution.


Not a pain, but coming from Debian/Gentoo not great either. Packaging

is one of the last areas that Solaris really needs an upgrade. You
might want to take a look at Nexenta, which is OpenSolaris with GNU
userland and apt-get. Works pretty well. Once installed you can update
it to Build 56 to get the iSCSI target.



I've thought about this. How stable is it for just serving (iscsi/nfs/cifs)
storage? What about when Zones are added with a db (pgdb, mydb) instance?

Nicholas
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Zfs best practice for 2U SATA iSCSI NAS

2007-02-17 Thread Jason J. W. Williams

Hi Nicholas,

ZFS itself is very stable and very effective as fast FS in our
experience. If you browse the archives of the list you'll see that NFS
performance is pretty acceptable, with some performance/RAM quirks
around small files:

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?threadID=19858
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=18394

To my understanding  the iSCSI driver is undergoing significant
performance improvements...maybe someone close to this can help?


If by VI you are referring to VMware Infrastructure...you won't get
any support from VMware if you're using the iSCSI target on Solaris as
its not approved by them. Not that this is really a problem in my
experience as VMware tech support is pretty terrible anyway.



Some questions:
1. how stable is zfs? i'm tolarent to some sweat work to fix problems
but data loss is unacceptable


We haven't experienced any data loss, and have had some pretty nasty
things thrown at it (FC array rebooted unexpectedly).


2. If drives need to be pulled and put into a new chasis does zfs
handle them having new device names and being out of order?


My understanding and experience here is yes. It'll read the ZFS lables
off the drives/slice.


3. Is it possible to hot swap drives with raidz(2)


Depends on your underlying hardware. To my knowledge hot-swapping is
not dependent on the RAID-level at all.


4. How does performance compare with 'brand name' storage systems?


No clue if you're referring to NetApp. Does anyone else know?

-J
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