I was looking into something like that last year, I was mirroring two iSCSI drives using ZFS. The only real problem I found was that ZFS hangs the pool for 3 minutes if an iSCSI device gets disconnected, unfortunately ZFS waits for the iSCSI timeout before it realises something has happened. After the 3 minutes it did offline the device and carry on working with the remaining one.
So if you don't mind a 3 minute wait if something goes wrong I think it will work fine. Also, since you can add mirrors at any stage with zpool attach, you can create the ZFS pool on your backup server, transfer the data over from your live machine, and once it's working, reformat your live machine as an iscsi volume and attach it to the pool. I think the idea of doing this as separate disks is a good one if you want to add disks later. Just bear in mind that you won't be able to have any kind of raid on the individual servers, your only protection will be the mirroring between the devices. Exporting them as one huge iSCSI volume is good if you're paranoid about data loss. You can use raid5 or 6 on the Linux servers, and then mirror those large volumes with ZFS. The downside is that it's much harder to add storage. I don't know if iSCSI volumes can be expanded, so you might have to break the mirror, create a larger iSCSI volume and resync all your data with that approach. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
