Whoops! I just realised I e-mailed my replies to this, but didn't copy the replies to here (too used to message boards, not mailing lists).
What we're hoping to do is to use ZFS, iSCSI and Sun Cluster to create a tiered, fully redundant storage architecture. We're planning to use a couple of Sun Thumpers, create dual parity ZFS pools on those, export those over iSCSI, and import those into a HA-ZFS cluster that will mirror the two. With redundant network links between everything, we have a very flexible architecture. We can take any one server offline with no disruption to our users, and I'm hoping that means we can carry out software upgrades with minimal effect too. Then on top of that we plan to run HA-Samba for our windows clients, and HA-NFS for vmware. If it works, possibly the most interesting thing is that we'll be taking a 100% windows network, and migrating all the storage to an OpenSolaris solution running on Sun hardware :-) Jeff: There are a couple of issues we've come across in our evaluation that are possibly deal breakers for this, if you could get us any feedback on these it would be hugely appreciated. 1. iSCSI hangs the entire system for far too long if a target goes offline. I can migrate between cluster nodes in 3-5 seconds, but if I pull the cable on an iSCSI target to simulate a crash, ZFS locks up for 3 minutes. We really need to be able to get iSCSI to timeout in a few seconds. I've detailed the problem here: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=205142𲅖 2. We're still to confirm this for ourselves, but it appears snapshots still prevent systems resilvering (bug 634667). This is a major problem for us. We're planning to take snapshots every 15 minutes to act as backups for our users, yet in our worst case scenario we potentially have to resilver a 20TB storage pool. If we ever need to resilver that we absolutely have to be able to carry on taking our 'backups' as usual. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
