The most critical thing about any storage implementation is flexibility. This means that you need to be able to adapt your solution to changing environmental considerations. The nice thing about a ZFS-based solution is that all of the building blocks are available. If you want to use it as a…
Adventures in ZFS: Storage Sizing
One of the most complex parts of storage in general and ZFS in particular is correctly assessing the amount and types of storage that you will need to meet your requirements. You can of course just purchase what you can afford and hope for the best. But after reading this…
Adventures in ZFS: Crucial M4 Firmware SMART Issue
Let me preface this article by stating that this issue is NOT a ZFS issue or a Solaris issue. Previously I documented a issue in which the Crucial M4 SSD would “hesitate” causing ZFS to see it as faulted. This was promptly fixed in v0002 of their firmware. That issue…
Linux-KVM: Converting Raw Disk Images to LVM Logical Volumes Redux
This really is an update to my previous article “Linux-KVM: Converting Raw Disk Images to LVM Logical Volumes“, but the process is significantly different and thus requires more explaining than a simple inline update would do it justice. Now the big flaw with my first article was that by using…
Adventures in ZFS: Configuring Fibre Channel Targets
In our environment ZFS has become a critical component of our Storage Infrastructure. We have been able to provision Fibre Channel storage from our ZFS file systems which give us the benefit of data integrity, deduplication, performance through use of the ARC, L2ARC, and ZIL as needed. Additionally the real…