Help designing ZFS pools / system

[josephdyland]

I am looking at setting up a storage server with either Open Indiana+Napp-IT or Nexenta Store Community.

I currently have the following Drives formatted as NTFS used in Windows; which I would like to move over to this new ZFS system;

1x 1TB Recorded PVR Movies - No redundancy needed
1x 1TB Recorded PVR Movies - No redundancy needed
1x 2TB Recorded PVR Movies - No redundancy needed
1x 2TB Recorded PVR TV Shows - No redundancy needed

The following Drives are spare that I will be adding to the ZFS System
1x 2TB
1x 2TB
1x 640 GB

In total these are the drives I have to work with.

1x 1TB Recorded PVR Movies - No redundancy needed
1x 1TB Recorded PVR Movies - No redundancy needed
1x 2TB Recorded PVR Movies - No redundancy needed
1x 2TB Recorded PVR TV Shows - No redundancy needed
1x 2TB
1x 2TB
1x 640 GB

I would like to set up something with some level of redundancy for Documents / Pictures and also will be backing that up onto External USB drive.

I have a IBM M1015 that arrived today and I will be flashing it to IT mode.

This card will plug into my ESXi 5 system (Super Micro X9SCI, Xeon E3 1230, 16 GB RAM) I will use VT-d to pass the card directly to my ZFS System.

I am unsure of how to setup the pools for my recorded media drives? Should I add each drive to its own pool if no redundancy is needed? then add a shared folder directly to each media drive?

and for the important files create either a Raid 1 or RAID Z?

Could any one suggest me some options for the hardware I have.

 

[danswartz]

Not clear from reading your post if you know this or not, but you can't just plug the NTFS drives in - you need to move the data off somewhere else, and reformat them as zfs, then move the data back. If you really have 4 drives with no redundancy needs, you are best off making each a separate pool - you COULD put them all in one pool, but any drive lost would lose you everything. Then, I would put the two new 2TB drives as a mirror for your other stuff. Install OI+napp-it or nexenta on the 640GB. Note that you need to put the drive for the ZFS appliance on a separate controller (mobo sata port?)

 

[Rowens]

If I understand you, you're looking for 2 buckets to drop stuff into: a big one for stuff you're not too concerned about, and a smaller one for stuff you don't want to die.

Assuming you want to keep the current division, you could simply build a non-redundant zpool of the 4 PVR drives, then a 2nd zpool for the OS and important data, made of a mirror of the 2 spare 2TB drives, and leave the 640GB on the shelf, or add it to the PVR pool, or use it as a cache. Don't try to include the 640GB in a mirror or raidz/raidz2 config, you'll constrict the rest of the drives down to 640GB. So long as you're backing up your document pool regularly (check out ZFS snapshots combined with send/receive), you should be fine. However, do be aware that a disk failure in your PVR pool could take chunks out of a lot of files, because of the way data is striped across the pool; that's the trade off for having one big bucket instead of (say) 4 separate PVR zpools.

Also, if you want to keep the current contents of the PVR disks, you'll need to offload the data somewhere, format the disks, then move the data back. If you're really tight for space you can do it one disk at a time, if you don't mind the extra hassles.

 

[MikeKlem]

I would Install Solaris on the 640GB drive, and add napp-it to that. Then take the 4x2TB, and create a raidz pool with those for the media. that leaves the 2x1TB for a raid1 mirror for your important docs.
This is assuming you have another data store to move the files onto, while you're reformatting the large drives to zfs.

Alternatively, if you can clear off one of the 2TB drives, create a four disk raidz array with one missing, then copy the data off the remaining 2TB, to the new array. Add the missing 4th 2TB into the zpool, let it rebuild, them move all the PVR data onto the newly resilvered array. that would leave you with the 1TB drives to mirror.

 

[josephdyland]

3 of my 2tb are Western Digital wd20ears2 Advanced Format drives, I have been having nothing but troubles trying to get these to work, I tested with 1 single WD20EARS;

drive goes offline /
Maybe a bad drive?.
Although I have seen a few solutions on ways to get these drives to work with ZFS (zpool-12, gnop). I am going to stick with a windows solution / SMB share for all the recorded media. I will stick to using 4x 2 TB drives in windows for this.

Now I think I have worked out a better solution for myself. I will have those 4 drives connected on the onboard SATA controller of my ESXi box and used with Windows, and also use Open Indiana with a m1015 card.

I will pass-through the IBM ServeRAID m1015 controller to Open Indiana.

My new question is, what would be some decent hard drives to purchase that play nice with ZFS, and easy on the power bill plus decent performance. (500 GB, 1TB, 2TB are all candidates)

I have 40 GB of documents / Pictures to store, and would like to play around with iSCSI/ZFS. > ESXi Datastore, which is where I would hope for performance out of this.

I would be looking at purchasing an additional 3-6 new drives. What should I purchase!?

 

[packetboy]

Even though you may not need redundancy, understand that when you strip 4 drives into one, you are now increasingly the likelihood of failure by a factor of 4 also (since any one drive failure will fail the entire strip). If you can assume this additional level of risk, then by all means, otherwise you'll want to at least have raidz.

Understand also, one of the major advantages of ZFS is you create one big pool and never have to play the games again about worry what will or will not fit into a bunch of scattered drive 'buckets'. As long as you chose the number of drives to be equal to what you think you might want to expand the pool by at some later point.

e.g. I start all my ZFS servers with 9 drives in raidz2 as expanding the pool with the next set of 9 drives is no problem for me. When working on a smaller scale, you probably only want to start with 4-5 drives, otherwise expanding the pool is rather costly and also requires the physical space to add drives (my enclosures handle 45 drives each, so 9 by expansion works well).

 

[josephdyland]

I need help making a decision, I currently own the following two drives (1 blue 1 Green)

WD10EALS Blue 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache Sata 2
WD10EADS Green 1TB 32MB Cache SATA 2

I want to build a 3 disks raidz zpool to start.

A couple of options of Western Digital HDD I can purchase locally are;

WD10EALX 1TB Caviar Blue7200rpm SATA III w/ 32MB Cache
WD10EARX 1TB Caviar Green 5400rpm SATA III w/ 64MB Cache

Should I purchase 1x 1 TB WD10EARX Green drive, and go with 2xGreen 1x Blue in the zpool?

Or would it be a better idea to purchase 2x new Blue drives to go with the 1xWD10EALS Blue 1TB I already have. which would give me 1x WD10EALS Blue 1TB and 2x WD10EALX Blue 1TB (I think these drives are the most similar but the new new ealx drives would be SATA 3 while the eal is sata 2..)

Just trying to finalize this solution and have changed my mind so many times