zfs discuss - Nov 2009 - Network shares to ZFS pool?

I am still confused here: if I have a file server somewhere and
want to add disk space from it to a ZFS pool, how do I provide this
disk space? iSCSI? Something else?

Mauricio Tavares wrote:
>       I am still confused here: if I have a file server somewhere and
> want to add disk space from it to a ZFS pool, how do I provide this
> disk space? iSCSI? Something else?
Yes iSCSI - the "file server" needs to support providing an iSCSI
target.

Or you could actually use a file in an NFS mount but I don''t think that
will perform that well.

-- 
Darren J Moffat

Hi Mauricio
On a Solaris Server, to create a ZFS pool, you would normally
use a set of locally attached hard drives.

If you have a iscsi target of some kind, you could use
the Solaris iscsi initiator to connect to the target across
an IP network.  Then the target would appear to be a local
hard drive to the Solaris server, and so could be used as part
of a ZFS pool. You could also use use Fibre Channel as an alternative to iscsi.

It is possible to make a ZFS pool from a set of ordinary files,
but that is just for experimenting/playing, and not 
for production. I guess those files could be stored
on a file server (NFS or CIFS), but I would not
want to do that for production!

Is that any clearer or are you still confused?
Regards
Nigel Smith
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Mauricio Tavares wrote:
>       I am still confused here: if I have a file server somewhere and
> want to add disk space from it to a ZFS pool, how do I provide this
> disk space? iSCSI? Something else?
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
>   
As Darren & Nigel have noted, iSCSI is currently the best way for a 
locally-attached disk on a remote machine to be mounted as a device for 
incorporation into a zpool on the machine in question.  iSCSI is 
supported by Linux and Solaris natively (both as a target [e.g. on the 
remote server] and as initiator [the client]).  Windows supports it as 
an initiator, and there are commercial target implementations available.

However, there is FiberChannel Over Ethernet, too.  It''s not what I 
would call really mature yet, but it''s been out for a couple of months,
at least on OpenSolaris  ( 
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+fcoe/WebHome ) and Linux ( 
http://www.open-fcoe.org/ ).

FCoE is faster than iSCSI, assuming that the path between your "remote 
server" and your potential client doesn''t go through any routing
(i.e.
they sit on the same ethernet subnet).


All of the above simply gets you a "local" device on your ZFS machine.
Adding it to a zpool is then no different than adding any local device.  
For latency and performance reasons, I would be /extremely/ reluctant to 
mix remote devices (iSCSI or FCoE) and local disks/files in the same 
zpool. Though, come to think about it, using a local (preferably SAS or 
SCSI 15k) disk as either a ZIL or ARC cache device for a zpool made up 
of remote iSCSI/FCoE targets would probably help performance. But I''d 
have to test that.


-- 
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop:  usca22-123
Phone:  x17195
Santa Clara, CA