On 01/12/2010 12:20 PM, JohnS wrote:
On Mon, 2010-01-11 at 16:16 -0500, Tom Georgoulias wrote:
CentOS 5.4 x86_64 works fine on the x4540s, I've installed it myself and didn't have to do anything special to see and use all of the disks.
In my testing, the IO was faster and the storage easier to administer with when using Solaris and ZFS rather than with CentOS and software raid. That kind of box is just made for ZFS.
Interesting, was the CentOS Box Tuned in any way?
Not really, everything was just setup using the defaults. I had a x4540 with 48 1TB drives and tried to recreate the raidz2 setup that I had tested with Solaris/zfs. I created six 6-disk RAID6 md devices, then added them into a single volume group and created a huge (5TB) logical volume with an XFS filesystem. I tried use one disk from each controller in each md device (as indicated by the hdtool that sun provides). I ran a variety of tests using tools like dd, iozone, tiobench, and sysbench and just watched how the server behaved. From what I could tell, the IO wasn't evenly spread across the disks in the md devices, just a subset.
I probably could've tweaked it some more, but I didn't have too much time to spend on it at the time. The Sun Storage 7000 series servers were a better fit for that project anyway.
Tom