Hi Edward, Thanks for your input.
Please see > http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2010-November/046189.html > > But I'll need to expand upon this a little more here: When we bought that > system, solaris was a supported os on the R710. We paid for oracle gold > support (or whatever they called it) and we dug into it for hours and > hours, > weeks and weeks, never got anywhere. > > When I replaced the NIC (don't use the built-in bcom nic) it became much > better. It went from crashing weekly to crashing monthly. > We have had no end of trouble with those junky broadcomm NICs. When we originally moved to all Dell hardware from a hosted solution we had a load of problems with the NICs just dropping packets when the CPU got busy. The platform for those machines was CentOS 5.5 -- It never created instability or server crashes, however. We generally use Intel NICs for our production interfaces now. Over the years I've found that Intel simply make rock solid NICs. We still use those broadcomm NICs but mostly for out of band/maintenance network access. On the host in question we are using Intel for the main production interface and a broadcomm device for maintenance. If I see any more issues, I'll consider disabling the onboard broadcomms via BIOS. So far with the sleep states disabled it seems better. I don't believe you'll ever be able to make the problem go away completely. > This is the nature of running on unsupported hardware - even if you pay and > get a support contract - they just don't develop or test on that platform > with any quantity, so the end result is crap. > > We have since reprovisioned the R710 to other purposes, where it's > perfectly > stable. We have also bought Sun (oracle) server to fill the requirements > that were formerly filled by the R710 with solaris, and it's also perfectly > stable. > > Unfortunately the point of using Solaris/ZFS for us in this particular instance is to avoid having to buy more hardware. We have a system that just needs to hold a lot of data and RAIDZ2 w/ lzjb gets us about 4-5X the useable space as a regular xfs/ext4 RAID-10 with the same disks. This system is legacy and just needs to live for another few months and support the data growth, so the idea here is to try to avoid spending money on something that is going away. This sort of precludes buying SnOracle(Sun) hardware to run Solaris on tried and true gear. :-/ Thanks and Regards, -- Lachlan Mulcahy Senior DBA, Marin Software Inc. San Francisco, USA AU Mobile: +61 458 448 721 US Mobile: +1 (415) 867 2839 Office : +1 (415) 671 6080
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