> CS> Suppose that you have a SAN environment with a lot of LUNs. In the > CS> normal course of events this means that 'zpool import' is very slow, > CS> because it has to probe all of the LUNs all of the time. > > CS> In S10U6, the theoretical 'obvious' way to get around this for your > CS> SAN filesystems seems to be to use a non-default cachefile (likely one > CS> cachefile per virtual fileserver, although you could go all the way to > CS> one cachefile per pool) and then copy this cachefile from the master > CS> host to all of your other hosts. When you need to rapidly bring up a > CS> virtual fileserver on a non-default host, you can just run > CS> zpool import -c /where/ever/<host>.cache -a > > CS> However, the S10U6 zpool documentation doesn't say if zpool cachefiles > CS> can be copied between systems and used like this. Does anyone know if > CS> this is a guaranteed property that is sure to keep working, something > CS> that works right now but there's no guarantees that it will keep working > CS> in future versions of Solaris and patches, or something that doesn't > CS> work reliably in general? > > CS> (I have done basic tests with my S10U6 test machine, and it seems to > CS> work ... but I might easily be missing something that makes it not > CS> reliable.) > > As long as both systems present disks in the same way (same paths) it > will work as expected. Even if they don't an import should still work > but without the benefit of a cache file.
It even works when the nodes have different CTD paths, as the ZFS tries to open using devid in case of CTD path failure. -Venku > > My understanding is that the the intention behind cachefile property > was to address poor's man clusters and (hopefully) to enhance hastoragplus > agent > to make use of it automatically so importing a pool would be quicker > in some environments. > > The other problem it addresses is that only pools listed in default > cache file will be automatically imported during os boot. > > > _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
