zfs on solaris OmniOS,

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rladi

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Until 3 Month ago I had a very satifying Installation Sun X4150 / Solaris 10 / ZFS .
Then I updated to the last Version of Solaris 10 and since then I experience sudden reboots from time to time.
I have very little experience in Solaris, the only reason why I ran this OS was ZFS.

Now I installed nappit/OmniOS in ESXi on a HP ML310 Server (thinking to use it as a backupserver) .
The Plan was to evaluate nappit/OmniOS and then to replace Solaris 10 on X4150 with OmniOS on ESXi.

But in the last week I had two kernel panics on OmniOS.

Should I try to investigate the reasons for the kernel panics? After the last rather frustrating experiences with Solaris I think to go with ZFS on LINUX. On Linux I never experienced similar problems.

Do you have any advice?

Thanks,
 
I would investigate - I've been running OmniOS & napp-it for quite some time. Previously bare-metal on consumer grade hardware, and now on Supermicro as a VM w/ HBA passthrough. Been extremely stable for me.
 
I would verify that they are OS related.

If they are, it could be that you need a custom driver or something.

Worst case, they rent, and there is actually a hardware problem, and the fact that they started at the same time that you installed the OS was a coincidence (Iv'e had this happen, and I wasted way too much time trying to troubleshoot the OS, when it was actually hardware)

I'd switch back and forth between OS:es (creative use of drive imaging can save you a lot of time here) and see if the issue is repeatable on one, and not the other.

If you are looking for other options, I have personally had great experienced with FreeNAS which is FreeBSD based.

In fact, I've never had a single stability issue with it. Been rock solid for me in various configurations for almost 5 years now.
 
Solaris and the free fork OmniOS is a very stable OS.
A kernel panic is mostly due to hardware problems (RAM, PSU etc) or
due a driver problem. As this is a quite old but generic Sun hardware,
you should not experience any problem beside one.

What kind of SAS disk controller are you using.
Afaik, Sun had used Adaptec and LSI in their systems. While LSI are today best use for ZFS,
Adaptec is known to be badly supported with current ZFS and Solaris editions.

If there is an Adaptec SAS Raid adapter, you can check Sata (AHCI) if the problem persists.
If so, skip the Adaptec for an LSI (LSI 9207, LSI 9211, IBM 1015 etc.

You may also try the new Oracle Solaris 11.3 with ZFS encryption, SMB 2.1, LZ4 compress
and ultrafast sequential resilver.
 
Many Thanks for your advices, they all point to investigate a hardware problem or driver problem;

I'll do some testing, and I'll buy an LSI disk controller card for the little HP ML310.
The old SUN machine has an LSI Controller;
 
Solaris 11.3 is much more modern and easier to work with. Try it? There is an liveCD or liveUSB I think
 
Omni has been very stable for me also, I use it on 3 different systems, I don't think it's ever crashed. My main production server has been up for 472 days currently.
 
dave99 said:
Omni has been very stable for me also, I use it on 3 different systems, I don't think it's ever crashed. My main production server has been up for 472 days currently.
Click to expand...

Nice,

I had an uptime close to that on a Linux server years ago, but these days not so much.


It's not because of a lack of stability, just that I get the itch to change something that affects uptime before then (OS upgrade, hardware change, etc.)
 
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