On October 22, 2008 04:27 am David Peall wrote:> While we are on the topic, I had a brief but happy encounter with ZFS
> while dump was broken on UFS2. Is there any indication as to when this
> would be suitable for a production environment?
Do you mean when will people use it in a production environment, or when
the experimental tag will be taken off? Those are two very different
things. :) The experimental tag will probably be taken of somewhere in
the 8.x lifetime, maybe 9.0 at the latest. That's my guess anyway.
As for people using it in production environments, that's already
happening.
Personally, we use it in production for a remote backup box using ZFS and
Rsync (64-bit FreeBSD 7-Stable from August, 2x dual-core Opteron 2200s, 8
GB DDR2 RAM, 24x 500 GB SATA disks attached to two 3Ware 9650/9550
controllers as single-disks). Works beautifully, backing up 80 FreeBSD
and Debian Linux servers every night, creating snapshots with each run.
Restoring files from an arbitrary day is as simple as navigating to the
needed .zfs/snapshot/<snapname>/<path>/ and scping the file to
wherever.
And full system restores are as simple as "boot livecd, partition/format
disks, run rsync".
We're going to be adding a second identical backup box at a second remote
location, and use the snapshot stream features to have redundant backups.
We're also looking at using a similar box as a storage node for a virtual
machine setup to create a disaster-recovery/fail-over site for all the
systems in our main server room. And if that works, then we may use a
similar setup to virtualise a bunch of the systems in the main server
room.
> Some of the tools build in to ZFS are very useful...
Pretty much everything about ZFS is useful, except the name. :) Would
have been better if they called it what it really is: the Zetabyte
Storage Management System. It's so much more than just a lowly
filesystem. Would probably solve a lot of confusion out there, IMO.
--
Freddie Cash
fjwcash@gmail.com