[OmniOS-discuss] big zfs storage?

Richard Elling richard.elling at richardelling.com
Wed Oct 7 22:38:11 UTC 2015 

> On Oct 7, 2015, at 1:59 PM, Mick Burns <bmx1955 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> So... how does Nexenta copes with hot spares and all kinds of disk failures ?
> Adding hot spares is part of their administration manuals so can we
> assume things are almost always handled smoothly ?  I'd like to hear
> from tangible experiences in production.

I do not speak for Nexenta.

Hot spares are a bigger issue when you have single parity protection.
With double parity and large pools, warm spares is a better approach.
The reasons are:

1. Hot spares exist solely to eliminate the time between disk failure and human
   intervention for corrective action. There is no other reason to have hot spares.
   The exposure for a single disk failure under single parity protection is too risky
   for most folks, but with double parity (eg raidz2 or RAID-6) the few hours you 
   save has little impact on overall data availabilty vs warm spares.

2. Under some transient failure conditions (eg isolated power failure, IOM reboot, or fabric 
   partition), all available hot spares can be kicked into action. This can leave you with a
   big mess for large pools with many drives and spares. You can avoid this by making a
   human be involved in the decision process, rather than just *locally isolated,* automated
   decision making.

 -- richard

> 
> 
> thanks
> 
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Schweiss, Chip <chip at innovates.com> wrote:
>> Liam,
>> 
>> This report is encouraging.  Please share some details of your
>> configuration.   What disk failure parameters are have you set?   Which
>> JBODs and disks are you running?
>> 
>> I have mostly DataON JBODs and a some Supermicro.   DataON has PMC SAS
>> expanders and Supermicro has LSI, both setups have pretty much the same
>> behavior with disk failures.   All my servers are Supermicro with LSI HBAs.
>> 
>> If there's a magic combination of hardware and OS config out there that
>> solves the disk failure panic problem, I will certainly change my builds
>> going forward.
>> 
>> -Chip
>> 
>> On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 1:04 PM, Liam Slusser <lslusser at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I have two 800T ZFS systems on OmniOS and a bunch of smaller <50T systems.
>>> Things generally work very well.  We loose a disk here and there but its
>>> never resulted in downtime.  They're all on Dell hardware with LSI or Dell
>>> PERC controllers.
>>> 
>>> Putting in smaller disk failure parameters, so disks fail quicker, was a
>>> big help when something does go wrong with a disk.
>>> 
>>> thanks,
>>> liam
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Schweiss, Chip <chip at innovates.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 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-kateleyco
>>>>> http://kateleyco.com
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
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>>> 
>> 
>> 
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