[OmniOS-discuss] big zfs storage?

[Schweiss, Chip]

Unfortunately for the past couple years panics on disk failure has been the
norm.   All my production systems are HA with RSF-1, so at least things
come back online relatively quick.  There are quite a few open tickets in
the Illumos bug tracker related to mpt_sas related panics.

Most of the work to fix these problems has been committed in the past year,
though problems still exist.  For example, my systems are dual path SAS,
however, mpt_sas will panic if you pull a cable instead of dropping a path
to the disks.  Dan McDonald is actively working to resolve this.   He is
also pushing a bug fix in genunix from Nexenta that appears to fix a lot of
the panic problems.   I'll know for sure in a few months after I see a disk
or two drop if it truly fixes things.  Hans Rosenfeld at Nexenta is
responsible for most of the updates to mpt_sas including support for 3008
(12G SAS).

I haven't run any 12G SAS yet, but plan to on my next build in a couple
months.   This will be about 300TB using an 84 disk JBOD.  All the code
from Nexenta to support the 3008 appears to be in Illumos now, and they
fully support it so I suspect it's pretty stable now.  From what I
understand there may be some 12G performance fixes coming sometime.

The fault manager is nice when the system doesn't panic.  When it panics,
the fault manger never gets a chance to take action.  It is still the
consensus that is is better to run pools without hot spares because there
are situations the fault manager will do bad things.   I witnessed this
myself when building a system and the fault manger replaced 5 disks in a
raidz2 vdev inside 1 minute, trashing the pool.   I haven't completely
yield to the "best practice".  I now run one hot spare per pool.  I figure
with raidz2, the odds of the fault manager causing something catastrophic
is much less possible.

-Chip



On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 11:37 AM, Linda Kateley <lkateley at kateley.com>
wrote:

>  I have to build and maintain my own system. I usually help others build(i
> teach zfs and freenas classes/consulting). I really love fault management
> in solaris and miss it. Just thought since it's my system and I get to
> choose I would use omni. I have 20+ years using solaris and only 2 on
> freebsd.
>
> I like freebsd for how well tuned for zfs oob. I miss the network, v12n
> and resource controls in solaris.
>
> Concerned about panics on disk failure. Is that common?
>
>
linda
>
>
> On 7/9/15 9:30 PM, Schweiss, Chip wrote:
>
>   Linda,
>
>  I have 3.5 PB running under OmniOS.  All my systems have LSI 2108 HBAs
> which is considered the best choice for HBAs.
>
> Illumos leaves a bit to be desired with handling faults from disks or SAS
> problems, but things under OmniOS have been improving, much thanks to Dan
> McDonald and OmniTI.   We have a paid support on all of our production
> systems with OmniTI.  Their response and dedication has been very good.
> Other than the occasional panic and restart from a disk failure, OmniOS has
> been solid.   ZFS of course never has lost a single bit of information.
>
>  I'd be curious why you're looking to move, have there been specific
> problems under BSD or ZoL?  I've been slowly evaluating FreeBSD ZFS, but of
> course the skeletons in the closet never seem to come out until you do
> something big.
>
>  -Chip
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Linda Kateley <lkateley at kateley.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hey is there anyone out there running big zfs on omni?
>>
>> I have been doing mostly zol and freebsd for the last year but have to
>> build a 300+TB box and i want to come back home to roots(solaris). Feeling
>> kind of hesitant :) Also, if you had to do over, is there anything you
>> would do different.
>>
>> Also, what is the go to HBA these days? Seems like i saw stable code for
>> lsi 3008?
>>
>> TIA
>>
>> linda
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> OmniOS-discuss mailing list
>> OmniOS-discuss at lists.omniti.com
>> http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss
>>
>
>
> --
> Linda Kateley
> Kateley Company
> Skype ID-kateleycohttp://kateleyco.com
>
>
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