We have been evaluating ZFS as a potential solution for delivering enterprise file services for our campus. I've posted a couple of times with various questions, but to recap we want to provide file space to our approximately 22000 students and 2400 faculty/staff, as well as group project space for about 1000 groups. Access will be via secure NFSv4 for our UNIX systems, and CIFS via samba for our windows/macosx clients (the in-kernel SMB server is not currently an option as we require official support).
We have almost completed a functional prototype (we're just waiting for an IDR for ACL inheritance so we can complete testing), and are currently considering deploying x4500 servers. We're thinking about 5, with approximately 6000 ZFS filesystems each (Solaris 10U5 still has scalability issues, any more than about 5-6 thousand filesystems results in unacceptably long boot cycles). I was thinking about allocating 2 drives for the OS (SVM mirroring, pending ZFS boot support), two hot spares, and allocating the other 44 drives as mirror pairs into a single pool. While this will result in lower available space than raidz, my understanding is that it should provide much better performance. Is there anything potentially problematic about this configuration? Low-level disk performance analysis is not really my field, I tend to live a bit higher up in the abstraction layer. I don't think there would be any performance issues with this, but would much appreciate commentary from the experts. Has there been a final resolution on the x4500 I/O hanging issue? I think I saw a thread the other day about an IDR that seems promising to fix it, if we go this route hopefully that will be resolved before we go production. It seems like kind of a waste to allocate 1TB to the operating system, would there be any issue in taking a slice of those boot disks and creating a zfs mirror with them to add to the pool? I'm planning on using snapshots for online backups, maintaining perhaps 10 days worth. At 6000 filesystems, that would be 60000 snapshots floating around, any potential scalability or performance issues with that? Any other suggestions or pointing out of potential problems would be greatly appreciated. So far, ZFS looks like the best available solution (even better if S10U6 comes out before we go production :) ), thanks to all of the Sun guys for their great work on that... -- 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
