On May 12, 2010, at 7:12 PM, Richard Elling <richard.ell...@gmail.com>
wrote:
On May 11, 2010, at 10:17 PM, schickb wrote:
I'm looking for input on building an HA configuration for ZFS. I've
read the FAQ and understand that the standard approach is to have a
standby system with access to a shared pool that is imported during
a failover.
The problem is that we use ZFS for a specialized purpose that
results in 10's of thousands of filesystems (mostly snapshots and
clones). All versions of Solaris and OpenSolaris that we've tested
take a long time (> hour) to import that many filesystems.
I've read about replication through AVS, but that also seems
require an import during failover. We'd need something closer to an
active-active configuration (even if the second active is only
modified through replication). Or some way to greatly speedup
imports.
Any suggestions?
The import is fast, but two other operations occur during import
that will
affect boot time:
+ for each volume (zvol) and its snapshots, a device tree entry is
made in /devices
+ for each NFS share, the file system is (NFS) exported
When you get into the thousands of datasets and snapshots range, this
takes some time. Several RFEs have been implemented over the past few
years to help improve this.
NB. Running in a VM doesn't improve the share or device enumeration
time.
The idea I propose is to use VMs in a manner such that the server does
not have to be restarted in the event of a hardware failure thus
avoiding the enumerations by using VMware's hot-spare VM technology.
Of course using VMs could also mean the OP could have multiple ZFS
servers such that the datasets could be spread evenly between them.
This could conceivably be done in containers within the 2 original VMs
so as to maximize ARC space.
-Ross
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