Hi Mike, mike wrote: > I'm looking for some suggestions here - I am an OSOL noob. I have used > Linux mainly, and some FreeBSD. Originally I planned on using FreeBSD for > this, but am a bit nervous about it's ZFS support, might as well run it > on the native kernel, and the upcoming OSOL build has a lot of neat > sounding features.
If I wasn't running OpenSolaris I'd be using FreeBSD. I've got a lot of confidence in Pawel's ZFS port. > Basically, my plan is to build a machine I can stick at home that will do > nightly rsyncs to servers that I administer for various reasons. When the > rsync is done, create a snapshot. Essentially nightly snapshots on the > receiver side, since I cannot change the OS/filesystem on the remote > servers. I don't know that there's a "when rsync is finished run script Z" sort of facility (though I reckon it would be handy, and as well as for ZFS recv), so I'd suggest just using zfs snapshots kicked off by cron at a period you determine to be most appropriate. > I'd plan on setting up one ZFS filesystem for each server. 15 at the most > to start. Probably wouldn't grow very much more than that. > > I'm looking at a few million files, no more than 2TB of data to start. > But I'd want plenty of room to grow. I also might decide to use this > machine for home media storage as well (so I'd be using CIFS and/or NFS > clients to access it) > > I'm looking for good hardware suggestions, I'd want 6 drives minimum. The > main thing is finding a chassis that will keep all of this quiet. Then > finding the right motherboard and/or extra SATA controller for more ports > (if needed) with well-supported chipsets, etc. A lot of people posting here appear to like chassis from SuperMicro. You might also want to consider an external enclosure; I've had good perf with a 4 disk Proavio Enhance 4-ML unit hanging off an LSI SAS controller. Proavio also do 8 disk units. > Services: ssh, ftp (maybe), cifs, nfs (maybe) > How much RAM would you suggest for this? I'm thinking 4GB should handle > these needs, but I have never adminned/dealt with a Solaris machine > before. If that's all you're doing, 4Gb should be plenty. At least for today ;-) > I'd be planning on running this on an Intel Core2 architecture. Would a > dual-core suffice? I assume so. ZFS eats address space for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so 64bit is the main concern, really. If you can pack in more cores, so much the better for you. Don't forget to spec a good nic too. > I'd be initiating the rsyncs at random times throughout the day - so it > won't be one huge hit at once, if that helps at all. > Any help is appreciated. FYI, I got more tempted to jump ship and try > OSOL for storage after reading this: > http://elektronkind.org/2008/07/opensolaris-2008-11-storage Just remember that ZFS snapshots are cheap (*very* cheap) and you can create as many as you want. For all practical definitions of "as many as you want" though surely 2^48 would be enough ;) Finally, welcome to the community. James C. McPherson -- Senior Kernel Software Engineer, Solaris Sun Microsystems http://blogs.sun.com/jmcp http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
