[OpenAFS] ZFS-on-Linux on production fileservers?

[Markus Koeberl]

On Friday 04 October 2013 16:31:47 Jeff Blaine wrote:
> [ For those running ext3/ext4, a question further down for you as ]
> [ well!                                                           ]
> 
> We're still a 100% Solaris + ZFS file server shop. We're EOLing
> our Sun SPARC hardware (with tears in our eyes) this year.
> 
> Before we spend a significant amount of time evaluating this, I
> figured I'd ask first. Any brief response would be greatly appre-
> ciated. The generously longer the better :)
> 
> * Are you using ZFS-on-Linux in production for file servers?

At home I started playing about two years ago.
I am now using a 3 disk raidz and a mirror. Had big problems with my hardware 
at the beginning. But thanks to ZFS I was able to eliminate the bad disks. Now 
everything is working.

At work I have one server running for 2 months now without big troubles
~30 linux $HOME volumes on a SSD mirror
~350 RO and 250 RW volumes on 12x2TB sata mirror +l2arc

> * If not, and you looked into it, what stopped you?
> * If you are, how is it working out for you?

I set arc_max to 8GB on a 24GB machine which lets me 1.9GB free at the moment. 
There have been suggestions on the mailinglist to play with arc_metadata_max 
and to set vm.min_free_kbytes to about 1% of RAM to avoid huge load or a lock 
up. I have not played around with this because limiting arc to 8GB es good 
enough for me at the moment. With compression set to lz4 it gives me good 
performance.


I strongly suggest to test well and to have a look at the current limitations 
of zfsonlinux (there have been several discussions on the mailing list). 


regards
Markus
-- 
Markus Koeberl
Graz University of Technology
Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory
E-mail: markus.koeberl@tugraz.at