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