[OmniOS-discuss] Boot from mirrored USB?

[Mark Homoky]

On 31/10/2013 13:53, Chris Nehren wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:54:50 +0000, Ben Summers wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm speccing out some new hardware. It seems challenging to get vendor supported configurations which give you lots of discs on a Solarish OS, rather than using horrid RAID cards.
>>
>> The best config I've found so far seems to be a Fujitsu RX200 with 4 internal 15k SAS discs (the internal supported card can only do 8 drives if you use RAID), plus a Fujitsu branded LSI controller connected to an Intel 3.5" JBOD array for bulk storage and maybe an SSD for ZIL.
>>
>> Because I'd like to use all the internal discs for a database as a pair of mirrors in a single JBOD, I was wondering if anyone boots from USB discs?
> SmartOS is designed to run from USB drives. I don't know if their
> configuration supports mirroring, though.

I guess that depends on how we interpret "mirroring". Mirrored boot
disks make sense and are required in a traditional environment such as
OmniOS.

SmartOS just needs a method of getting the server up and running.
SmartOS can be booted from a USB stick; CD ROM; or iPXE boot -
effectively two fallback methods in addition to your primary boot method.

ZFS has use of all the disks - internal or otherwise - for data
storage.  Depending on their size I'd recommend 3-way mirrors to ensure
redundancy in the event of a disk failure and long resilver times.

I'm not against OmniOS - we run it here and love it! The only negative I
can see running SmartOS is the lack of IPS packaging - but it's a minor
negative at that.

-- 

Mark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://omniosce.org/ml-archive/attachments/20131031/9c191836/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 899 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://omniosce.org/ml-archive/attachments/20131031/9c191836/attachment-0001.bin>