Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, Brian Kolaci wrote:
I have a customer that is trying to move from VxVM/VxFS to ZFS,
however they have this same need. They want to save money and move to
ZFS. They are charged by a separate group for their SAN storage
needs. The business group storage needs grow and shrink over time, as
it has done for years. They've been on E25K's and other high power
boxes with VxVM/VxFS as their encapsulated root disk for over a
decade. They are/were a big Veritas shop. They rarely ever use UFS,
especially in production.
ZFS is a storage pool and not strictly a filesystem. One may create
filesystems or logical volumes out of this storage pool. The logical
volumes can be exported via iSCSI or FC (COMSTAR). Filesystems may be
exported via NFS or CIFS. ZFS filesystems support quotas for both
maximum consumption, and minimum space reservation.
Perhaps the problem is one of educating the customer so that they can
ammend their accounting practices. Different business groups can share
the same pool if necessary.
They understand the technology very well. Yes, ZFS is very flexible with many
features, and most are not needed in an enterprise environment where they have
high-end SAN storage that is shared between Sun, IBM, linux, VMWare ESX and
Windows. Local disk is only for the OS image. There is no need to have an
M9000 be a file server. They have NAS for that. They use SAN across the
enterprise and it gives them the ability to fail-over to servers in other data
centers very quickly.
Different business groups cannot share the same pool for many reasons. Each
business group pays for their own storage. There are legal issues as well, and
in fact cannot have different divisions on the same frame let alone shared
storage. But they're in a major virtualization push to the point that nobody
will be allowed to be on their own physical box. So the big push is to move to
VMware, and we're trying to salvage as much as we can to move them to
containers and LDoms. That being the case, I've recommended that each virtual
machine on either a container or LDom should be allocated their own zpool, and
the zonepath or LDom disk image be on their own zpool. This way when (not if)
they need to migrate to another system, they have one pool to move over. They
use fixed sized LUNs, so the granularity is a 33GB LUN, which can be migrated.
This is also the case for their clusters as well as SRDF to their COB machines.
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