On 01/30/10 05:33 PM, Ross Walker wrote:
On Jan 30, 2010, at 2:53 PM, Mark <white...@gmail.com> wrote:
I have a 1U server that supports 2 SATA drives in the chassis. I have
2 750 GB SATA drives. When I install opensolaris, I assume it will
want to use all or part of one of those drives for the install. That
leaves me with the remaining part of disk 1, and all of disk 2.
Question is, how do I best install OS to maximize my ability to use
ZFS snapshots and recover if one drive fails?
Where were you planning to send the snapshots? There's been a lot
of discussion about this on this list, but my solution is to mirror the
entire system and zfs send/recv to it periodically to keep a live backup.
Alternatively, I guess I could add a small USB drive to use solely for
the OS< and then have all of the 2 750 drives for ZFS. Is that a bad
idea since the OS drive will be "standalone"?
Just install the OS on the first drive and add the second drive to form
a mirror. There are wikis and blogs on how to add the second drive to
form an rpool mirror.
After more than a year or so of experience with ZFS on drive constrained
systems, I am convinced that it is a really good idea to keep the root pool
and the data pools separate. AFAIK you could set up two slices on each disk
and mirror the results. But actually I'm not sure why you shouldn't use
your USB drive for root pool idea. If it breaks you simply reinstall (or
restore
it from a snapshot on your data pool after booting from a CD). I suppose
you could mirror the USB drive, too, but if you can stand the downtime
after a failure, that probably isn't necessary. Of course, SSDs are getting
pretty cheap in bootable sizes and will probably last forever if you don't
swap to them, and that would be an even better solution. USB SSD thumb
drives seem to be quite cheap these days.
The you'd have a full-disk mirrored data pool and a fast bootable OS pool;
if you go the SSD route I'd go for at least 32GB. Of course you could get
a 1TB USB drive to boot from, and use it to keep a backup of the data pool,
but if it failed, you'd be SOL until you replaced it. IMO that would be the
best 3-disk solution. Should be interesting to hear from the gurus about this...
Cheers -- Frank
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