Just wanted to post a quick follow-up to this. Original thread is here[1] -- not quoted for brevity.
Andrew Gabriel suggested[2] that this could possibly be some workload triggered issue. We wanted to rule out a driver problem and so we tested various configurations under Solaris 10U9 and OpenSolaris with correct 4K block alignment. The "Unit Attention" errors under all operating environments for any X-25E (we haven't tested other brands) when used as ZIL and attached to one of the LSI port expanders used in Silicon Mechanics hardware. As soon as we move the drives to the onboard SATA controller or directly attach to the LSI controller (bypassing the expander) the issues go away. Perhaps tweaking the firmware on the port expander would have resolved the issue, but we're not able to test that scenario currently. Of note, heavy workload wasn't required to trigger the problem. We ran bonnie++ hard on the system -- which appeared to tax the ZIL quite a bit, but got no errors. However, as soon as we set up an NFS VMware datastore and loaded a couple VM's on it the Unit Attention errors began popping up -- even when they weren't particularly busy. In any case, we'll probably stop chasing our tails on this issue and will begin mounting all drives used for ZIL internally directly attached to the onboard SATA controllers. Thanks, Ray [1] http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2010-August/044362.html [2] http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2010-August/044364.html _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
