zfs question

[David Rawling]

  On 9/08/2010 2:52 AM, krad wrote:
> On 8 August 2010 16:51, Adam Vande More<amvandemore at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Dick Hoogendijk<dick at nagual.nl>  wrote:
>>>   On 8-8-2010 14:27, Matthew Seaman wrote:
>>>> Yes. It works very well.
>>>> On amd64 you'll get a pretty reasonable setup out of the box (so to
>>>> speak) which will work fine for most purposes.
>>> One other thing comes to mind. I want a very robus, fast rockl solid
>>> *server*
>>> It will be a file- email and webserver mostly.
>>>
>>> Instead of using two ZFS mirrors I could also go for gmirror (I'm not
>>> familiar with it, but it's been around for quite some time so it should
>> be
>>> very stable). I don't get the data integrity that way, but my files would
>> be
>>> safe, no?
>>>
>>> Also, using gmirror I could use "normal" BSD UFS filesystems and normal
>>> swap files devided across all disks?
>>> Or am I wrong, thinking this way.
>>>
>>> I'm not into fancy stuff; it has to be robust, fast and safe.
>>
>> You do not *need* amd64, however it would the best choice.  I wouldn't even
>> mess around with gmirror.  It's great and I love it, but it has some
>> serious
>> drawback's compared to zfs mirroring.  One is there is no integrity
>> checking, and two is a full resyc is required on an unclean disconnect.
>>
>> http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot/Mirror
>>
>> --
>> Adam Vande More
> you could add a gjournal layer in there as well for better data integratity.
> I think you can do softupdates + journal as well now although I have never
> used it
If you're after a rock solid server, then to be brutally honest it is less 
important to decide what you run than it is to choose something that you know 
well.

Since you have 4 years of Solaris/OpenSolaris experience recently, you are 
likely to know ZFS better than gmirror.

So I ask you to ponder - at four o'clock in the morning, with mail down, web 
servers down and all the disks holding your files failing to mount - which 
file system or disk structure would you prefer to try to troubleshoot?

Dave.

-- 
David Rawling
Principal Consultant
PD Consulting And Security
Mob: +61 412 135 513
Email: djr at pdconsec.net