configuration specific ZFS configuration

[incognito]

Good evening everyone.

I wanted to start by saying that freenas is a fantastic project with a great deal of functionality and ease of use. I followed freenas in it's earlier days and now I've returned, what a great deal of progress the team has made... fantastic work!

To my question.

I've read the freenas slideshow and do believe I have a decent understanding of ZFS and the configuration specifics. My freenas box will be exclusively used for iSCSI and VMWare vSphere 5.1.

The hardware

Supermicro 24 Bay Chassis w/SAS2 Backplane
1 x Intel 530 120 GB SSD < Boot
20 x 1 TB Toshiba 1TB 7200RPM SAS2 Drives <- Storage
2 x Intel 310 120 GB SSD <- ZIL
2 x Intel 530 240 GB SSD <- L2ARC
LSI 9211-8I HBA Flashed with IT Firmware
64 GB Ram
2 x Intel Quadcore Xeon

From what my reading indicates, I should be creating 2 pools with 10 drives per pool raidz2. I've figured that out, but I get lost when trying to figure out how to assign the ZIL and L2ARC.

Some guidance would be beneficial, I'm open to doing a screen share and paying a bounty for some initial configuration guidance and tweaking given my specific requirements. Either way, I'll be making a donation to the project.

If anyone is willing to help and give me some general guidance that would be super cool!

 

[iceman47777]

Why would you install the boot on an SSD and not USB or SD card?

And why duel SSD for ZIL and L2ARC?

 

[iceman47777]

My setup

UCS C240

16GB SanDisk SD card 95MB/s for Boot

LSI cards
22 x 900 GB HD 10k SAS
1 x 100 GB SSD ZIL
1 x 100 GB SSD L2ARC
192 GB RAM
Intel duel 10Gbe LACP

I run about 15 High load VMs on this over 2 hosts, if I could change my mind I would have gotten fusion io cards instead of the SSD.

 

[incognito]

Hi ... thanks for the response.

The main board in my chassis doesn't have an internal USB or SD card slot for booting. I chose to boot of the single SSD, it's attached to the main boards SATA port and not the HBA. This works great and boots up super fast.

I was under the impression that the ZIL and L2ARC should be mirrored, is this wrong?

I was not able to figure out how to create the pools then assign the ZIL and L2ARC from the webgui, I know I should be undercommiting the ZIL, maybe 2-8gb in size. Not sure how to do that.

Any other ESX specific tweaks would be great.

 

[incognito]

Bumping it up!

Anyone interested in helping me configure my freenas box to best suite my requirements above?

I'll offer $200 usd to the person who can give me a hand. $100 up front and $100 when complete.

 

[cyberjock]

I'll help you I guess. PM me with a phone number in the USA or Skype info. I'm in CST time and I'm typically up until midnight.

 

[cyberjock]

Done! All setup. Of course, as soon as I setup SMART reporting it immediately started logging errors on one of his Toshiba disks.. hehe.

 

[KTrain]

I read in another post that you should mirror the log and stripe the L2ARC. Thinking it has something to do with potentially loosing the log due to disk failure and blowing up your storage volumes.

 

[survive]

Hi KTrain,

It used to be the loss of a ZIL was fatal to the pool...while that's no longer true the failure of the ZIL does cost you whatever data was "in transit" to the disks when it failed. This could or could not prove to be a terrible thing. Smart money will always mirror their ZIL. A striped L2ARC just makes the cache that much faster. Keep in mind all the caveats with ZIL & L2ARC and remember the best plan is to first max out your RAM before investing in cache drives.

-Will

 

[KTrain]

Thanks for clarifying that, still trying to get my head around all of this. :)

 

[survive]

KTrain,

Single best thing you can do is read through this: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

-Will

 

[KTrain]

KTrain,

Single best thing you can do is read through this: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

-Will

That's actually next on my list, I've got it open on my laptop right now. Thanks for the recommendation!