ZFS-L Questions Coming from an OpenSolaris ZFS install

[Jason J. W. Williams]

My company has been a heavy ZFS user for our databases since 2006 on
OpenSolaris. Due to various reasons we're having to move off of
OpenSolaris and I've been looking for alternatives to ZFS that would
give us the same snapshotting and checksumming (and zpool equivalent
for management). BTRFS still looks pretty unstable and ZFS on FreeBSD
doesn't use the ZFS test suite for their testing which makes me wary.

ZFS on Linux seems to have matured a lot since I first looked at it in
September but I had a couple of questions I was hoping someone could
help with:

1.) Does ZFS on Linux use the ZFS test suite for validating
compatibility and stability? One reason ZFS has been so rock solid for
us on OpenSolaris since day one has a lot to do with that test suite.

2.) It appears ZFS-L supports v28 of the filesystem, does that mean
y'all are supporting cache and log devices? Are people seeing the same
performance boost that we see when using them with ZFS on OS?

3.) Is anyone running large MySQL or other databases on ZFS-L? Would
be very interested to hear your experiences. A lot of performance
tweaks went into ZFS on Solaris in the last couple of years to improve
the database workload performance. Curious particularly if those have
translated well into ZFS-L.

Thank you in advance for any help. I really appreciate it.

-J

[Khushil Dep]

I would think Nexenta should be an early point if call. I've deployed this in both mssql and mysql environments to great effect.

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[Jason J. W. Williams]

You've deployed Nexenta or KQ ZFS on Linux?

-J

[Khushil Dep]

Ah oops, wrong ZFS list! No, Nexenta on its own.

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[Jason J. W. Williams]

Yeah...I've deployed Nexenta as well for MySQL installs. My questions were garnered towards that application for ZFS on Linux.

-J

[Hugues Talbot]

At this point I think it is fair to say that zfs on Linux is unstable, and there is nothing equivalent on the horizon. Check back in a couple years and the situation will be different, but at this stage using ZFS on Linux in a production environment is very much "use at your own risk".

The next stable platform after all the Solarises is FreeBSD. I don't know about log devices but they do support cache devices, and it does help, yes. If this is not good enough for you, you are out of luck, I think.

[Khushil Dep]

If you really need to do it on Linux, talk to KQ about a fully supported solution and make sure you UAT thoroughly. They should have a fair partner network now.

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On 23 Mar 2011 07:39, "Hugues Talbot" <hugues...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Jason J. W. Williams]

> The next stable platform after all the Solarises is FreeBSD. I don't know about log devices but they do support cache devices, and it does help, yes. If this is not good enough for you, you are out of luck, I think.

That's truly too bad. With the way Oracle has destabilized the OpenSolaris ecosystem it's pretty much impossible to convince any major managed server provider to offer any Solaris variant including Nexenta. I suppose I'll have to give FreeBSD a shot. Nice to hear the log device support works on the ported platforms.

Thank you for your help and insights. All things being equal I would prefer to keep Solaris.

-J

P.S.
To the subsequent poster...buying support from KQ doesn't really change the fact of whether ZFS on Linux is stable enough for production or not.

[Khushil Dep]

Talk to Andy Bennett at Nexenta who will be able to recommend a full spectrum managed server provider with Nexenta.

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[Jason J. W. Williams]

Hi Khushil,

Actually I've already spoken with Nexenta. The have many who offer NexentaStor, none who offer Nexenta Core which is what we'd need. The only providers who meet our needs (except for OpenSolaris) are Softlayer and Voxel.

Joyent uses OpenSolaris & ZFS, but unfortunately they don't expose the ZFS filesystem to the container you're running in preventing snapshotting on demand.

-J