We are looking for a replacement enterprise file system to handle storage needs for our campus. For the past 10 years, we have been happily using DFS (the distributed file system component of DCE), but unfortunately IBM killed off that product and we have been running without support for over a year now. We have looked at a variety of possible options, none of which have proven fruitful. We are currently investigating the possibility of a Solaris 10/ZFS implementation. I have done a fair amount of reading and perusal of the mailing list archives, but I apologize in advance if I ask anything I should have already found in a FAQ or other repository.
Basically, we are looking to provide initially 5 TB of usable storage, potentially scaling up to 25-30TB of usable storage after successful initial deployment. We would have approximately 50,000 user home directories and perhaps 1000 shared group storage directories. Access to this storage would be via NFSv4 for our UNIX infrastructure, and CIFS for those annoying Windows systems you just can't seem to get rid of ;). I read that initial versions of ZFS had scalability issues with such a large number of file systems, resulting in extremely long boot times and other problems. Supposedly a lot of those problems have been fixed in the latest versions of OpenSolaris, and many of the fixes have been backported to the official Solaris 10 update 4? Will that version of Solaris reasonably support 50 odd thousand ZFS file systems? I saw a couple of threads in the mailing list archives regarding NFS not transitioning file system boundaries, requiring each and every ZFS filesystem (50 thousand-ish in my case) to be exported and mounted on the client separately. While that might be feasible with an automounter, it doesn't really seem desirable or efficient. It would be much nicer to simply have one mount point on the client with all the home directories available underneath it. I was wondering whether or not that would be possible with the NFSv4 pseudo-root feature. I saw one posting that indicated it might be, but it wasn't clear whether or not that was a current feature or something yet to be implemented. I have no requirements to support legacy NFSv2/3 systems, so a solution only available via NFSv4 would be acceptable. I was planning to provide CIFS services via Samba. I noticed a posting a while back from a Sun engineer working on integrating NFSv4/ZFS ACL support into Samba, but I'm not sure if that was ever completed and shipped either in the Sun version or pending inclusion in the official version, does anyone happen to have an update on that? Also, I saw a patch proposing a different implementation of shadow copies that better supported ZFS snapshots, any thoughts on that would also be appreciated. Is there any facility for managing ZFS remotely? We have a central identity management system that automatically provisions resources as necessary for users, as well as providing an interface for helpdesk staff to modify things such as quota. I'd be willing to implement some type of web service on the actual server if there is no native remote management; in that case, is there any way to directly configure ZFS via a programmatic API, as opposed to running binaries and parsing the output? Some type of perl module would be perfect. We need high availability, so are looking at Sun Cluster. That seems to add an extra layer of complexity <sigh>, but there's no way I'll get signoff on a solution without redundancy. It would appear that ZFS failover is supported with the latest version of Solaris/Sun Cluster? I was speaking with a Sun SE who claimed that ZFS would actually operate active/active in a cluster, simultaneously writable by both nodes. From what I had read, ZFS is not a cluster file system, and would only operate in the active/passive failover capacity. Any comments? The SE also told me that Sun Cluster requires hardware raid, which conflicts with the general recommendation to feed ZFS raw disk. It seems such a configuration would either require configuring zdevs directly on the raid LUNs, losing ZFS self-healing and checksum correction features, or losing space to not only the hardware raid level, but a partially redundant ZFS level as well. What is the general consensus on the best way to deploy ZFS under a cluster using hardware raid? Any other thoughts/comments on the feasibility or practicality of a large-scale ZFS deployment like this? Thanks much... -- Paul B. Henson | (909) 979-6361 | http://www.csupomona.edu/~henson/ Operating Systems and Network Analyst | [EMAIL PROTECTED] California State Polytechnic University | Pomona CA 91768 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
