On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Ian Collins <[email protected]> wrote:

> Greg Zartman via smartos-discuss wrote:
>
>> I believe mirroring is the best practice so that if one SSD dies, you
>> don't lose any data before the slog has time to write to the zpool.
>>
>
> You won't loose any data if a log device dies or is pulled.  Logs are only
> read from to recover data, such as after a power failure which is why you
> should devices with power fail protection.
>


I wanted to follow up on this comment, as I just proved to myself that you
do lose your zones zpool if the log device fails.

I've been testing with Intel 3700 SSDs and a couple SmartOS boxes I have.
On one of the boxes, I lost the log device and the zones zpool disappears
on a reboot.  I reproduced it 2 times by just pulling the log device.

Technically; you don't "lose" data, but you do lose your zones zpool and
the box is essentially nuked.  The admin has to boot SmartOS into
maintenance mode, force a re-import of the zones zpool, the remove the
lost/bad log device to get SmartOS too boot back up.

This isn't exactly a routine maintenance task.  As such, I don't think it
is safe to run a SmartOS box in production with a single log device unless
you don't mind have to perform minor surgery on the box to get it back up
again.

Greg



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