[OpenIndiana-discuss] ML350G6 What to do?

[jason matthews]

On 12/10/15 5:35 AM, the outsider wrote:
>   
> 3. idea is to create a ZFS RAID Z2 pool with 4 or more drives
RAIDZ2 on four drives, if you need any kind of performance, is silly. 
The red drives are still fairly slow by todays standards. Performance 
wise, you would be better off with a set of 2x2 mirrors. WWJD - what 
would jason do. Well, mirrors, that's what I would do.

In my humble opinion, you should buy more smaller drives than a just a 
few big ones. WD doesnt have the best name in the navy for reliability 
either so consider spares as well. I use 6TB red drives in my home 
system, but I keep them in 3-way mirrors -- i wont roll the dice using 
western digital without extreme protection. The WD's cousin, HGST, 
produces highly reliable drives but they cost more.

The specs say you can put up to 8 WD Red drives into an enclosure, where 
the limiting factor is vibration. The WD Pro drives can do 16 
drives/encosure or so the specs say.  I am not sure how many bays you 
have, probably 8, but I would plan to use them all. Resilvering a 4TB 
drive takes a long long time.

Aside from raidz2 versus mirrors, please consider how you are going to 
maintain a backup in case the unexpected happens. It might be that you 
backup to a single 6tb drive. So, that is something to think about. HGST 
has some new cool 10TB drives, but i havent checked on pricing for those.

>
> The questions I have:
>
> 1. What should I install: OI Hipster or OI 151a8 or ??
>

I use oi151a9 at home and a combination of a9 and smartos at work. 
smartos provides the flexibility of LX branded zones for those instances 
where you dont want the potential instability by adding KVM to the mix. 
This has been handy for example, to run the controller for ubiquiti 
access points or to spin up modern versions of ELK without having to 
port a bunch of software way outside of our core line of business.

I primarily view the  driver as ZFS. When people balk when I tell them 
Apsalar is using IllumOS I proceed to describe the system hundreds of 
netapp filers on which we can run applications with fantastic data 
handling capabilities -- then they sort of get it in abstract way. For 
me, it is about ZFS. I am happy to use freebsd or any illumos 
distribution. The politics and packaging systems are a distraction to 
me. It is not like your system is going to run faster or slower based on 
your distribution.

>
> 2. What is the current limit for OI and WD RED series SATA drive sizes?
>
Limit? I dunno about a limit. My 6TB reds worked out of the box on a LSI 
2308 based controller. If there is a problem, it will in your controller 
not in IllumOS.

>
> 3. I could create a RAID1 config on the P410i with 2x 500GB for the OI OS,
> then I am a bit safer regarding disk failure. But would it work?
Safer? No, not safer. I see no reason to use hardware raid.

>
> 4. Because the P410i doesn't have JBOD function I want to set all disks as
> RAID0 single disk and create a ZFS pool around them, or ?
This is the definition of jenky

Why dont you just use a proper controller, like an LSI 9207-8i.