I don't mean to be offensive Russel, but if you do ever return to ZFS, please promise me that you will never, ever, EVER run it virtualized on top of NTFS (a.k.a. worst file system ever) in a production environment. Microsoft Windows is a horribly unreliable operating system in situations where things like protecting against data corruption are important. Microsoft knows this, which is why they secretly run much of Microsoft.com, their www advertisement campaigns, and the Microsoft Updates web sites on Akamai Linux in the data center across the hall from the data center where I work.... and the invulnerable file system behind Microsoft's "cloud" that secretly runs on Akamai's content delivery system is none other than ZFS's long lost brother... Netapp WAFL! The first time I started to catch on to this was when the Project Mojave advertisement campaign started and lots of people were nmap scanning the site and noticing that it was running Apache on Linux:
http://openmanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/07/mss-blunder-with-mojave-experiment-uses.html Eventually Microsoft realized they messed up and started to edit the header strings like they usually do to make it look like IIS: https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/nosi-discussion/2008-August/000417.html although you could still figure it out if you were smart enough by using telnet like this: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/17/wwwmicrosoftcom_runs_linux_up_to_a_point_.html but the cat was already out of the bag. I did some investigating over a year ago and talked to some of my long time friends who were senior Akamai techs, and one of them eventually gave me a guided tour after hours and gave me a quick look at the Netapp WAFL setup and explained how Microsoft Windows updates actually work. Very cool! These Akamai guys are like the "Wizard of Oz" for the Internet running everything behind the curtains there. Whenever Microsoft Updates are down- Tell an Akamai tech! Everything's will start working fine within 5 minutes of you telling them (sure beats calling in to Microsoft Tech Support in Mumbai India). Is apple.com or itunes running slow? Tell an Akamai tech and it'll be fixed immediately. Cnn.com down? Jcpenny.com down? Yup. Tell an Akamai tech and it comes right back up. It's very rare that they have a serious problem like this one: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/akamai_goes_postal/ in which case 25% of the internet (including google, yahoo, and lycos) usually goes down with them. So my question to you Russel is- if Microsoft can't even rely on NTFS to run their own important infrastructure (they obviously have a Netapp WAFL dependancy), what hope can your 10TB pool possibly have? What you're doing is the equivalent of building a 100 story tall skyscraper out of titanium and then making the bottom-most ground floor and basement foundation out of glue and pop sickle sticks, and then when the entire building starts to collapse, you call in to the Titanium metal fabrication corporation, blame them for the problem, and then tell them that they are obligated to help you glue your pop sickle sticks back together because it's all their fault that the building collapsed! Not very fair IMHO. In the future, keep in mind that (as far as I understand it) the only way to get the 100% full benefits of ZFS checksum protection is to run it in on bare metal with no virtualization. If you're going to virtualize something, virtualize Microsoft Windows and Linux inside of OpenSolaris. I'm running ZFS in production with my OpenSolaris operating system zpool mirrored three times over on 3 different drives, and I've never had a problem with it. I even created a few simulated power outages to test my setup and pulling the plug while twelve different users were uploading multiple files into 12 different Solaris zones definitely didn't phase the zpool at all. Just boots right back up and everything works. The thing is though, it only seems to work when you're not running it virtualized on top of a closed-source proprietary file system that's made out of glue and pop sickle sticks. Just my 2 cents. I could be wrong though. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
