Thinking of using ZFS/FBSD for a backup system

[CZUCZY Gergely]

Yes Kris, but you've forgot something quite important.
What you've just showed is -CURRENT, and how does that thumb-rule is
about branches and (semi-)production systems? 
My faint memories say something like "don't never ever even think of
running -CURRENT on a production box", in a polite way.
ZFS can be stable on -CURRENT but it's till -CURRENT, with its issues
as a production system. So, the last we can go about a backup box is
-STABLE, but i also wouldn't prefer that one, if I can. -RELEASE and
patches for production, to be safe.

Give us a stable ZFS in -RELEASE and -STABLE and we will be statisfied
and happy. -CURRENT is still not a way for production boxes, that's
asking for trouble.

I've finetuned ZFS as much as I could, I've read every little tiny bit
of hint/information/whatever that was available and I couldn't get rid
of those kmem_size panics in -RELEASE and -STABLE.

On Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:50:18 +0200
Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> mike wrote:
> > On 7/8/08, CZUCZY Gergely <phoemix at harmless.hu> wrote:
> > 
> >> Regardless of this, the system worked quite well. If ZFS were
> >> stable, this easily could be our backup system. ZFS is great,
> >> awesome, but a bit unreliable on FreeBSD, still needs some work.
> > 
> > Really? I thought ZFS for basic things was not too bad in FBSD now.
> > 
> > By basic I mean simple filesystem creation, snapshots and normal
> > devices. Not some crazy SAN LUNs and weird volume management stuff.
> > 
> > I would really love to use FBSD as opposed to a Solaris derivative,
> > since I know nothing about them and I'd have to dedicate a machine
> > for it at home. Hrm. I wonder if I could just get by running a
> > Solaris derivative inside of a VM in VMware or something.
> 
> ZFS needs careful memory tuning, but really, it's otherwise stable
> and it can be done.
> 
> (ports-i386:~>sysctl hw.ncpu
> hw.ncpu: 4
> (ports-i386:~)> sysctl hw.physmem
> hw.physmem: 4275478528
> (ports-i386:~)> uname -a
> FreeBSD pointyhat.freebsd.org 8.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT #31:
> Wed Jun 25 19:40:40 UTC 2008 
> kris at pointyhat.freebsd.org:/usr/src/sys.cvs/amd64/compile/POINTYHAT
> amd64 (ports-i386:~)> cat /boot/loader.conf
> vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1
> vm.kmem_size=1572864000
> 
> This machine is highly disk loaded, with 1.08TB of disk, a load
> average usually between 8-30, currently hosting 94 ZFS filesystems,
> 898 snapshots, and making heavy use of ZFS features like cloning, 
> incremental snapshot send/receive, etc.  The disk workload is highly 
> vnode-intensive, involving concurrent rsyncs over trees containing 
> hundreds of thousands of files, busy NFS exports to about 40 clients, 
> cvs updates, etc, constantly cycling through millions of vnodes.
> 
> It works just fine.
> 
> Kris


-- 

Sincerely,

Gergely CZUCZY,
Harmless Digital
mailto: gergely.czuczy at harmless.hu

Legacy software is software that works.
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