[CentOS] 8-15 TB storage: any recommendations?
Warren Young
warren at etr-usa.com
Fri Jan 8 02:42:41 UTC 2010
On 1/7/2010 6:01 PM, Christopher Chan wrote:
>
>> I'm not recommending OpenSolaris on purpose.
>
> Serious system administrators are not Linux fans I don't think.
I think I must have been sent back in time, say to 1997 or so, because I
can't possibly be reading this in 2010. I base this on the fact that
your statement logically means there are no serious Linux sysadmins,
which is of course is so much hooey that no one believes this any more
in the time I come from. Therefore, I must have been sent far enough
back in time that such statements were still uttered with complete
seriousness.
I guess the other possibility is that someone's gatewayed a Usenet
advocacy group to this list.
> I find pkg on OpenSolaris to be more akin to yum or apt than ports
In some ways, sure. Ports is definitely a different way of doing
things, though, I think, not a bad one.
There are several areas where OpenSolaris' package system falls down:
1. No free updates. Even if you just want security fixes, you have to
buy a support contract. (If you think this is reasonable, why are you
here on the CentOS list, a place for discussing a solution to a
different but similar problem?)
2. There is no upgrade path from release to release other than
"reinstall", and releases are spaced just 6 months apart. Between this
and the previous problem, it means I have to reinstall my server every 6
months to keep up to date if I don't want to buy a support contract.
Those serious sysadmins where you come from like this sort of thing? In
my world, we prefer OSes with long term support so we can stay current
on a release for years at a time.
3. The main package repo is pretty sparse. If you want anything even a
little bit nonstandard you end up downloading sources from the Internet
and compiling by hand, which may not even succeed since Solaris is down
in the third tier or so of popularity these days. At least with
FreeBSD's ports, you're pretty much guaranteed that it will build and
install with "sudo make install clean", even chasing down dependencies
for you automatically.
4. At least back in the 2008.05 and 2008.11 days when I last tried to
really use OpenSolaris, I found IPS to be quite immature. I managed,
twice, to render a machine unbootable simply by removing packages I
thought I didn't need, using the GUI package manager. No warnings, just
boot...bang. Now maybe I'm being unrealistic, but I would think one of
the basic requirements for a package manager is that it know enough
about dependencies to refuse to let me uninstall core system components.
After discovering all that, I'm afraid I rather lost interest in trying
to make serious use of OpenSolaris. I keep a VM of it around merely to
test compatibility with a free software project I maintain. I won't
install it on anything critical now, not without taking the time to do a
complete reeval of it, anyway. It's been a year...maybe it's time.
> and then there is always nexenta if I
> really want a complete GNU userland and apt/dpkg.
How many different machines have you tried it on? Perhaps you have been
lucky, and have found that it installs on everything you want it to run
on.
In my experience, both NCP and NexentaStor made me jump through quite a
few hoops to find a hardware configuration they were happy with. Even
after I got them working, neither seemed valuable enough to bother
sticking with them, compared to OSes I already know and trust to just run.
> Does it support direct sharing/exporting as nfs/cifs/iscsi
NFS, yes, that's how I'm using it.
CIFS, no, as there is no CIFS support in FreeBSD's kernel. Of course,
you can always just use Samba.
iSCSI, no, because there isn't yet any iSCSI serving support in FreeBSD
of any kind. Since I didn't want my ZFS pools to be directly attached
to another machine, but rather shared among multiple machines in
traditional file-server manner, this didn't cause a problem for me.
Let me bounce this ball back in your court: how about AFS, for the Macs
in your organization? ZFS has no direct support for it on either
platform, but at least on FreeBSD and most Linuxes, it's a supported
package, available on demand, already preconfigured for that system.
All you have to do is do local customizations to the configuration, set
it to start automatically, and you're done. With OpenSolaris, it's a
fully manual process.
> Does it support using ZFS for booting
Not as part of the OS installer, but it can be done:
http://lulf.geeknest.org/blog/freebsd/Setting_up_a_zfs-only_system/
This doesn't interest me because it shares the same limitation as on
Solaris, which is that it will only work with a mirror. I don't want to
dedicate two disks just to the OS if I want a RAID-Z pool for actual data.
My solution for high root FS reliability was to put it on a CF card. In
addition to being solid state, it has a few side benefits:
- It lets me use an otherwise unused ATA connection.
- It's small enough that I can mount it in otherwise dead space in the
chassis, instead of taking up a precious disk bay.
Once I got the system installed, I moved some top-level trees into
dedicated ZFS pools, so my root filesystem is now quite small and rarely
touched.
> lot more on vinum than there is on zfs in the FreeBSD manual.
I did most of my FreeBSD ZFS setup using the Solaris ZFS Admin Guide
PDF. Everything it asked me to do worked fine on FreeBSD.
Yes, I'm sure you can point to places where a thing will work on Solaris
and not on FreeBSD, but I haven't found anything that actually *matters*
to me yet.
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