[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hi - can anybody help me get OI installedthe way I'd like?

[Kimmo Jaskari]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 17:19, Mansion, James <James.Mansion at sc.com> wrote:
> Well, I have a tiny NAS enclosure which holds 5 drives.  And I have an
> external eSATA3 port, and a suitable 60gig SSD.
>
> The box will hold 8gig RAM.  It's a home NAS and I can live with a small
> possibility of issues with losing some recent updates and downtimes if
> it goes bang.  I'd like to use RAIDZ for 6gig of store.  I know its not
> ideal given that some of the use is light db use
> (postgres+archiveopteryx) hence I'd like to help that out with L2ARC and
> ZIL.

Methinks you're over-complicating things. :) You'll get fully usable
data speeds (on a home-user level anyway) with a RAIDZ drive set
without worrying about separate ZIL devices, and you'll sacrifice ease
of administration if you do anything too complex. I'm on my third
server right now with the same disks in a RAIDZ set, and all I have to
do is make sure the data is on that RAIDZ - then, losing the boot
drive becomes only mildly frustrating (have to reinstall the OS and do
a zpool import and you have your data back).

> But - surely I *am* looking at that IO helper situation?  The NAS drives
> are low-power SATA with low RPM, and the SSD is pretty fast.

A ZIL device will really only help you if you do (very?) heavy writes
to the database, as far as I can gather. The RAIDZ set can take care
of the log just fine otherwise, I've run a three-disk RAIDZ at home on
commodity hardware and it isn't super quick but it's not a major
bottleneck by any means even when shifting large quantities of data
over gigabit to it.

Of course things can go wrong, such as getting the wrong 2TB drives
with 4k to 512k emulation (WD EARS I'm looking at you) that can
cripple the data transfer rates, but... unless you're looking at heavy
write activity you should try what you can do with just an OS drive
and the RAIDZ set, in my opinion.

> This email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged.  If you are not the addressee, do not disclose, copy, circulate or in any other way use or rely on the

Aaannd... ye holy crappe. :) Your disclaimer (which is legally worth
absolutely zip) is literally longer than the message. :p

-- 
-{ Kimmo Jaskari }--{ kimmo.jaskari at gmail.com }--

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go
away." -- Philip K. Dick