On Aug 6, 2009, at 5:36 AM, Ian Collins <i...@ianshome.com> wrote:
Brian Kolaci wrote:
They understand the technology very well. Yes, ZFS is very
flexible with many features, and most are not needed in an
enterprise environment where they have high-end SAN storage that is
shared between Sun, IBM, linux, VMWare ESX and Windows. Local disk
is only for the OS image. There is no need to have an M9000 be a
file server. They have NAS for that. They use SAN across the
enterprise and it gives them the ability to fail-over to servers in
other data centers very quickly.
Different business groups cannot share the same pool for many
reasons. Each business group pays for their own storage. There
are legal issues as well, and in fact cannot have different
divisions on the same frame let alone shared storage. But they're
in a major virtualization push to the point that nobody will be
allowed to be on their own physical box. So the big push is to
move to VMware, and we're trying to salvage as much as we can to
move them to containers and LDoms. That being the case, I've
recommended that each virtual machine on either a container or LDom
should be allocated their own zpool, and the zonepath or LDom disk
image be on their own zpool. This way when (not if) they need to
migrate to another system, they have one pool to move over. They
use fixed sized LUNs, so the granularity is a 33GB LUN, which can
be migrated. This is also the case for their clusters as well as
SRDF to their COB machines.
If they accept virtualisation, why can't they use individual
filesystems (or zvol) rather than pools? What advantage do
individual pools have over filesystems? I'd have thought the main
disadvantage of pools is storage flexibility requires pool shrink,
something ZFS provides at the filesystem (or zvol) level.
--
Ian.
For failover scenarios you need a pool per application so they can
move the application between servers which may be in different
datacenters and each app on one server can fail over to a different
server. So the storage needs to be partitioned as such. The failover
entails moving or rerouting San.
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