[BBLISA] ZFS Anyone?

[Grant Young]

Our experience with ZFS has been pretty good.  It's been improved  
considerably from it's early days and it's still maturing.  We  
occasionally run into oddities but it works as well or better for us  
than Veritas Storage Foundation.  We've been using it to host Solaris  
10 zones with no significant issues.  Our storage has been EMC  
Clariion so it's a bit richer than your target.  I'd seriously look at  
the Sun 7000 series if it can fit your budget.  It has some serious  
storage features for the price.  Having Sun support for the whole  
stack will also help if you have an issue.  ZFS is just new enough  
that other vendors don't have experience with it yet.  Also, NetApp  
has this lawsuit thing with ZFS so they won't even talk to you about it.

On Apr 3, 2009, at 1:46 PM, Dewey Sasser wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am in need of more, FAST storage.
>
>
>
> The Brief Background:
>
> I have 6 beefy VMWare ESX hosts (DL380, 2xQuad, 32GB), soon to  
> expand to
> 9 (and all to go up to 48GB), on which I'm running VMWare ESX 3.5
> managed by LabManager (current capacity 180 virtual machines,  
> expanding
> to around 400 with host and RAM expansion).  My storage so far has
> managed to usually keep up but occasionally it falls off a cliff.   
> I've
> 3 months of IOStat numbers but don't believe I have a very clear  
> idea of
> where said cliff edge really is.
>
> I currently have a 20 disk HP DL380 running RedHat EL 5.3 and have  
> some
> stability problems which significantly interfere with performance  
> tuning
> (right now my heavy load is on a single 6 disk RAID 10 and every  
> time I
> try to resize the partition the volume hangs.)
>
> I'm supporting development and test machines for a 40 person  
> development
> group.  This system is *NOT* customer facing but is important for
> engineering productivity.
>
> I've been talking to various VARs about NetApp, EquiLogic and Left  
> Hand
> storage systems and the price/GB seems...high.  It's also clear that  
> my
> existing system performance is pretty darn good for the base tech (990
> IOps average in 50% write load on 7.2k SAS drives).
>
> We've recently started thinking about deploying a Sun ZFS based  
> storage
> system, either on a "build it ourselves" or "buy a 7000 series storage
> box" basis.  I've read through Sun's "this is the best thing since the
> transistor" slide presentation and a fair amount of the admin manual,
> and it looks fairly cool and I can see some reasons it might be better
> than LVM2 on RAID.
>
>
>
> The Questions:
>
>    * Does anyone have experience with ZFS?  What has your experience  
> been?
>    * Is it stable/reliable/etc.  Honestly, before this experience LVM2
>      has been rock solid for me across many deployments.
>    * What kind of performance should I expect?
>    * What are the worst/most annoying parts of dealing with ZFS?
>    * Why should I not use it?
>    * Why should I use it?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Dewey
>
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