ZFS - Building, Testing, and Benchmarking
by Matt Breitbach on October 5, 2010 4:33 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Linux
- NAS
- Nexenta
- ZFS
Shortcomings of OpenSolaris
OpenSolaris, while a great platform for a storage system does lack some features that we consider necessary for a dedicated storage array. One thing that never worked quite right was the LED's on the front of the chassis. It was very difficult to know which drive was which after they were installed. The drive names shown in the operating system do not correspond with the physical drives in any consistent way. This would make troubleshooting a drive failure very difficult, as you'd not know which drive was which drive. Ideally, a red LED should come on beside the failed drive so it will be easy for a tech to quickly swap the correct drive.
Another shortcoming was the lack of a built-in Web GUI. The Promise system comes with a web interface to create, destroy, and manage logical volumes. OpenSolaris has no such interface. It's all done via command line controls. Granted once you've become familiar with those command line tools, it's not terrible to set up and destroy volumes, but it'd be nice to have a GUI that allowed you the same control while making it easier for first-timers to manage the system.
The last and possibly most important shortcoming of OpenSolaris is the lack of an automatic notification system if there is a failure. No email goes out to page a system administrator if a drive dies, so when the system has a drive failure you may never know that a drive has failed. This presents a very clear danger for usage in the datacenter environment, because most of us just expect to be notified if there is a problem. The Promise solution does this very well and all you have to do is put in an SMTP server address and an email address to send the notification messages to.
All of these can be solved with custom scripting within OpenSolaris. An even easier solution is to simply use Nexenta. They already have the LED's and notifications figured out. It's a very simple to get Nexenta configured to notify you of any failures.
Another solution is to buy third-party LED/FMA code. We have tried the SANtools package and it seems to work pretty well for enabling LED's, but there is still some work to be done before it is as easy as Nexenta. If you use the code from SANtools to control the LED’s, you will still need to write some scripts to polls FMA and send notifications and launch the SANtools script to control the LED’s. You can find the SANtools software here:
While this is very possible to script all of this with FMA, I'm not interested in re-inventing the wheel. Until someone comes up with this code and contributes it into the OpenSolaris project, it is simply not practical for most people to use OpenSolaris directly. OpenSolaris should have code built into the core for notifying the system administrator and for shining the LED on the correct drive.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
102 Comments
View All Comments
vla - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Along the lines of the "Opensolaris is kind of dead" threads, I'd really like to see an article like this for BTRFS. It's about to become the standard filesystems for Fedora and Ubuntu in the near future, and I'd love to get some AnandTech depth articles about it.. what it can do, what it can't. How it compares to existing Linux filesystems, how it compares to ZFS, etc.andersenep - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
When btrfs is ready for production use, let me know. From what I have seen it is still very much experimental. When it's as stable and proven as ZFS, I would love to give it a try. I have severe doubts that Oracle will continue to invest in its development now that it owns ZFS.Khyron320 - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I have never heard of any caching feature mentioned for BTRFS and it is not mentioned on the wiki anywhere. Is this a planned feature?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Features
Sabbathian - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Only site where you can find articles like these.... thank you guys ... ;)lecaf - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
Hiwhy not do some extra testing with Windows Storage Server R2 (just released a few days ago)
I'm sure it would lag behind but it could be interesting to see how much.
Mattbreitbach - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
I do not believe that Windows Storage Server is an end-user product. I believe that it is only released to OEM's to ship on their systems. At this time we have no route to obtain Windows Storage Server.lecaf - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
True its OEM only and not public but "evaluation" version is available with Technet and MSDNWithout a license key you can run it for 180 days (like all new MS OS BTW)
but you can also try this
http://www.microsoft.com/specializedservers/en/us/...
Just a registration and you get the software. (Read license because benchmarking is sometimes prohibited)
Sivar - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
BSD supports ZFS as well, and it is far from dead.Of course, it's also far from popular.
Guspaz - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
"We decided to spend some time really getting to know OpenSolaris and ZFS."OpenSolaris is a dead operating system, killed off by Oracle. Points for testing Nexenta, since they're the ones driving the fork that seems to be the successor to OpenSolaris, but basing your article around a dead-end OS isn't very helpful to your readers...
Mattbreitbach - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - link
When this project was started, OpenSolaris was far from dead. We decided to keep using OpenSolaris to finish the article because a viable alternative wasn't available until three weeks ago. If we were to start this article today, it would be based on OpenIndiana. Some of our preliminary testing of OpenIndiana indicate that it performs even better than OpenSolaris in most tests.