Sharing a ZFS boot mirror with a ZIL and/or a L2ARC

L

lizardking009

Gawd
Joined
Nov 18, 2005
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An OpenSolaris boot mirror for a storage server is very likely to see almost no I/O. Would OpenSolaris allow you to carve out slices on the boot devices so it could share it with the a mirrored ZIL and/or the L2ARC?

I know FreeBSD could do it...
 
Yes BSD can. Well usually you create partitions on the disks, so first partition would be for the mirror and second partition would be free. Then you can use them for ZFS.

But for that to work, OpenSolaris has to allow using software RAID on partitions instead of whole disks. My knowledge ends there. What have you tried so far?
 
Nothing. :) I'm just at the curiosity state and it doesn't help that OpenSolaris and Nexenta 3.0b2 both panic on ESX.

My thought is a pair of MLC SSDs for boot/L2ARC and a pair of 2.5" 15K SAS drives for the ZIL.
 
You can do it... though ZFS prefers entire disks, so you may get odd performance numbers, you can just slice the disk and set the L2ARC on the second slice would be fine... on paper...

Not sure how the performance would be in a real world benchmark though. Would be worth persuing to see though.


SSDs a bit overkill for boot drives though TBH.
 
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