zfs discuss - Nov 2008 - Seeking thoughts on using SXCE rather than Solar 10 on production servers.

Anyone who follows this list we have seen a number of issues with
Solaris 10 and ZFS from me this week.

We deployed Solaris 10 for the usual conservative reasons, support and
stability.  Most of my my ZFS experience has been with SXCE and I''ve
seen problems reported and fixed a couple of builds later.  The further
SXCE moves ahead of Solaris 10 ZFS, the longer (and probably more
difficult) the task of back porting these fixes will become.

So my question is, for production servers (x4540) that are primarily SMB
(80%) and NFS (20%) file servers, would you deploy  SXCE with native
CIFS support, or Solaris 10/Samba?

I wouldn''t hesitate to go with the former, relying on Live Upgrade to
incorporate fixes rather than patching.  Persuading clients may be a
little harder!

-- 
Ian.

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com>
wrote:
> Anyone who follows this list we have seen a number of issues with
> Solaris 10 and ZFS from me this week.
>
> We deployed Solaris 10 for the usual conservative reasons, support and
> stability.  Most of my my ZFS experience has been with SXCE and
I''ve
> seen problems reported and fixed a couple of builds later.  The further
> SXCE moves ahead of Solaris 10 ZFS, the longer (and probably more
> difficult) the task of back porting these fixes will become.
>
> So my question is, for production servers (x4540) that are primarily SMB
> (80%) and NFS (20%) file servers, would you deploy  SXCE with native
> CIFS support, or Solaris 10/Samba?
>
> I wouldn''t hesitate to go with the former, relying on Live Upgrade
to
> incorporate fixes rather than patching.  Persuading clients may be a
> little harder!
At the present time, I would go with Solaris 10. I don''t have a problem
with SXCE as such (although many recent builds have had some issues -
not necessarily with zfs); the problem I do have is with whether SXCE has
a sustainable future. Solaris 10 has years of support left in it, but what
happens once SXCE is scrapped and you can''t update any further?

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/

Peter Tribble wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com>
wrote:
>   
>> Anyone who follows this list we have seen a number of issues with
>> Solaris 10 and ZFS from me this week.
>>
>> We deployed Solaris 10 for the usual conservative reasons, support and
>> stability.  Most of my my ZFS experience has been with SXCE and
I''ve
>> seen problems reported and fixed a couple of builds later.  The further
>> SXCE moves ahead of Solaris 10 ZFS, the longer (and probably more
>> difficult) the task of back porting these fixes will become.
>>
>> So my question is, for production servers (x4540) that are primarily
SMB
>> (80%) and NFS (20%) file servers, would you deploy  SXCE with native
>> CIFS support, or Solaris 10/Samba?
>>
>> I wouldn''t hesitate to go with the former, relying on Live
Upgrade to
>> incorporate fixes rather than patching.  Persuading clients may be a
>> little harder!
>>     
>
> At the present time, I would go with Solaris 10. I don''t have a
problem
> with SXCE as such (although many recent builds have had some issues -
> not necessarily with zfs); the problem I do have is with whether SXCE has
> a sustainable future. Solaris 10 has years of support left in it, but what
> happens once SXCE is scrapped and you can''t update any further?
>
>   
My main concern is the sate of play now.  I''ve already managed to badly
crash Solaris 10 twice with zfs send/receive and we''ve pretty much
ruled
Solaris 10 with zfs send/receive out for data replication.  I''m going
to
repeat my testing with SXCE, the zfs receive performance fixes should be
in the next spin.

-- 
Ian.