Hi all, (down to the wire here on EDU grant pricing :) i''m looking at buying a pair of 7110''s in the EDU grant sale. The price is sure right. I''d use them in a mirrored, cold-failover config. I''d primarily be using them to serve a vmware cluster; the current config is two standalone ESX servers with local storage, 450G of SAS RAID10 each. the 7110 price point is great, and i think i have a reasonable understanding of how this stuff ought to work. I''m curious about a couple things that would be "unsupported." Specifically, whether they are "not supported" if they have specifically been crippled in the software. 1) SSD''s I can imagine buying an intel SSD, slotting it into the 7110, and using it as a ZFS L2ARC (? i mean the equivalent of "readzilla") 2) expandability I can imagine buying a SAS card and a JBOD and hooking it up to the 7110; it has plenty of PCI slots. finally, one question - I presume that I need to devote a pair of disks to the OS, so I really only get 14 disks for data. Correct? thanks! danno -- Dan Pritts, Sr. Systems Engineer Internet2 office: +1-734-352-4953 | mobile: +1-734-834-7224 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs July 19-23, 2009 - Indianapolis, Indiana http://jointtechs.es.net/indiana2009/
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 11:51:44AM -0400, Dan Pritts wrote:> I''m curious about a couple things that would be "unsupported." > > Specifically, whether they are "not supported" if they have specifically > been crippled in the software.We have not crippled the software in any way, but we have designed an appliance with some specific uses. Doing things from the Solaris shell by hand my damage your system and void your support contract.> 1) SSD''s > > I can imagine buying an intel SSD, slotting it into the 7110, and using > it as a ZFS L2ARC (? i mean the equivalent of "readzilla")That''s not supported, it won''t work easily, and if you get it working you''ll be out of luck if you have a problem.> 2) expandability > > I can imagine buying a SAS card and a JBOD and hooking it up to > the 7110; it has plenty of PCI slots.Ditto.> finally, one question - I presume that I need to devote a pair of disks > to the OS, so I really only get 14 disks for data. Correct?That''s right. We market the 7110 as either 2TB = 146GB x 14 or 4.2TB 300GB x 14 raw capacity. Adam -- Adam Leventhal, Fishworks http://blogs.sun.com/ahl
We have a 7110 on try and buy program. We tried using the 7110 with XEN Server 5 over iSCSI and NFS. Nothing seems to solve the slow write problem. Within the VM, we observed around 8MB/s on writes. Read performance is fantastic. Some troubleshooting was done with local SUN rep. The conclusion is that 7110 does not have write cache in forms of SSD or controller DRAM write cache. The solution from SUN is to buy StorageTek or 7000 series model with SSD write cache. Adam, please advise if there any fixes for 7110. I am still shopping for SAN and would rather buy a 7100 than a StorageTek or something else. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Both iSCSI and NFS are slow? I would expect NFS to be slow, but in my iSCSI testing with OpenSolaris 2008.11, performance we reasonable, about 2x NFS. Setup: Dell 2950 with a SAS HBA and SATA 3x5 raidz (15 disks, no separate ZIL), iSCSI using vmware ESXi 3.5 software initiator. Scott -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
There''s a configuration issue in there somewhere. I have a ZFS based system serving up to some ESX servers working great with a few exceptions. First off perf was awful, but there was some confusion on how to optimize network traffic on ESX so I installed a fresh one using only the defaults, no jumbo frames, no etherchannel and I was able to push the ZFS server to wire speed read and write over iSCSI. I still have the write problem over NFS though. I should be back in the datacenter tomorrow to see if it''s specific to the ESX NFS client. So my advice is to start looking at all of the tweaks that have been applied to the networking setup on the Xen side first. Cordialement, Erik Ableson +33.6.80.83.58.28 Envoy? depuis mon iPhone On 18 juin 2009, at 21:06, lawrence ho <no-reply at opensolaris.org> wrote:> We have a 7110 on try and buy program. > > We tried using the 7110 with XEN Server 5 over iSCSI and NFS. > Nothing seems to solve the slow write problem. Within the VM, we > observed around 8MB/s on writes. Read performance is fantastic. Some > troubleshooting was done with local SUN rep. The conclusion is that > 7110 does not have write cache in forms of SSD or controller DRAM > write cache. The solution from SUN is to buy StorageTek or 7000 > series model with SSD write cache. > > Adam, please advise if there any fixes for 7110. I am still shopping > for SAN and would rather buy a 7100 than a StorageTek or something > else. > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20090618/3b09310a/attachment.html>
With XenServer 4 and NFS you had to "grow" the disks (modified manually from thin to fat) in order to get decent performance. On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 7:06 AM, lawrence ho <no-reply at opensolaris.org>wrote:> We have a 7110 on try and buy program. > > We tried using the 7110 with XEN Server 5 over iSCSI and NFS. Nothing seems > to solve the slow write problem. Within the VM, we observed around 8MB/s on > writes. Read performance is fantastic. Some troubleshooting was done with > local SUN rep. The conclusion is that 7110 does not have write cache in > forms of SSD or controller DRAM write cache. The solution from SUN is to buy > StorageTek or 7000 series model with SSD write cache. > > Adam, please advise if there any fixes for 7110. I am still shopping for > SAN and would rather buy a 7100 than a StorageTek or something else. >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20090619/b0e8994a/attachment.html>
Hey Lawrence, Make sure you''re running the latest software update. Note that this forumn is not the appropriate place to discuss support issues. Please contact your official Sun support channel. Adam On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 12:06:02PM -0700, lawrence ho wrote:> We have a 7110 on try and buy program. > > We tried using the 7110 with XEN Server 5 over iSCSI and NFS. Nothing seems to solve the slow write problem. Within the VM, we observed around 8MB/s on writes. Read performance is fantastic. Some troubleshooting was done with local SUN rep. The conclusion is that 7110 does not have write cache in forms of SSD or controller DRAM write cache. The solution from SUN is to buy StorageTek or 7000 series model with SSD write cache. > > Adam, please advise if there any fixes for 7110. I am still shopping for SAN and would rather buy a 7100 than a StorageTek or something else. > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss-- Adam Leventhal, Fishworks http://blogs.sun.com/ahl
The Dell SAS controller probably have on-board write cache which helps with performance (write commit). Based on my limited understanding, the 7110 does not have write cache on SAS controller. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org