Darren J Moffat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Chris Siebenmann wrote: >>| Still, I'm curious -- why lots of pools? Administration would be >>| simpler with a single pool containing many filesystems. >> >> The short answer is that it is politically and administratively easier >>to use (at least) one pool per storage-buying group in our environment. > > > I think the root cause of the issue is that multiple groups are buying > physical rather than virtual storage yet it is all being attached to a > single system. I will likely be a huge up hill battle but: if all the > physical storage could be purchased by one group and a combination of > ZFS reservations and quotas used on "top level" (eg one level down from > the pool) datasets to allocate the virtual storage, and appropriate > amounts charged to the groups, you could technical be able to use ZFS > how it was intended with much fewer (hopefully 1 or 2) pools.
The scenario Chris describes is one I see repeatedly at customers buying SAN storage (as late as last month!) and is considered a best practice on the business side. We may want to make this issue and it's management visible, as people moving from SAN to ZFS are likely to trip over it. In particular, I'd like to see a blueprint or at least a wiki discussion by someone from the SAN world on how to map those kinds of purchases to ZFS pools, how few one wants to have, what happens when it goes wrong, and how to mitigate it (;-)) --dave ps: as always, having asked for something, I'm also volunteering to help provide it: I'm not a storage or ZFS guy, but I am an author, and will happily help my Smarter Colleagues[tm] to write it up. -- David Collier-Brown | Always do right. This will gratify Sun Microsystems, Toronto | some people and astonish the rest [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Mark Twain (905) 943-1983, cell: (647) 833-9377, (800) 555-9786 x56583 bridge: (877) 385-4099 code: 506 9191# _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
