ZFS in productions 64 bit

[Freddie Cash]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Tonix (Antonio Nati)
<tonix at interazioni.it>wrote:

> Freddie Cash ha scritto:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Tonix (Antonio Nati)
>> <tonix at interazioni.it>wrote:
>>
>>>  Freddie Cash ha scritto:
>>> On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 7:27 AM, Tonix (Antonio Nati)<
>>> tonix at interazioni.it> <tonix at interazioni.it>wrote:
>>>   Is anyone using in heavy production environment a ZFS FS with AMD 64
>>> bit?
>>>
>>>  We're using FreeBSD 7.2 on our backup servers.  The primary backup
>>> server
>>> does remote backups for over 105 servers, every night.  And then pushes
>>> the
>>> changes to the secondary backup server, every day.
>>>
>>> Are you using ZFS only on backup servers, or also on remote servers to
>>> make
>>> a snaphost of data to be backed up?
>>>
>>
>> Only on the backup servers.  The remote servers are running either Debian
>> Linux 4.0, FreeBSD 6.x/7.x, or RHEL 4.x.  And we do a couple of manual
>> backups of Windows XP stations using rsync for Windows.
>>
>>
> I'm evaluating whether to use ZFS for main NFS storage I will provide to
> all front-end servers.
> Possibility to snapshost partitions, to extend/decrease them is something
> I'd love to do, but I'm wondering on reliability on long term. I see main
> concerns are about 32bit servers, while 64bits servers looks to be more
> 'protected', but I'm not really sure about.
>
> Better to wait for FBSD 8.0?
>
> Thanks for any advice.
>

ZFS on 64-bit FreeBSD 7.2 has been extremely stable for us.  A lot of bug
fixing, performance issues, and memory issues were fixed in ZFS with 7.2.
The version of ZFS included in 7.2 is ZFSv6.

FreeBSD 7-STABLE includes an upgrade of ZFS to ZFSv13.  This will be
available in FreeBSD 7.3, and is the same as what will be in FreeBSD 8.0.

The main difference in ZFS support between 7.x and 8.x is that 8.x includes
support for booting directly from ZFS, so you can run ZFS-only systems.

We haven't stress tested NFS support, but have used it to share out a couple
of directories here and there (to Linux clients), and it seems to be as
stable/usable as normal NFS in FreeBSD.  AFAICT, ZFS uses the normal NFS
support in FreeBSD to do the sharing, and the sharenfs property for ZFS
filesystems just configures the exports file for you.

64-bit installs with lots of RAM are recommended to get the most out of ZFS,
although it is perfectly usable on 32-bit systems.  There are reports of
people using it on laptops and on 32-bit systems with as little as 768 MB of
RAM.  (I use it on my home media server which is 32-bit with 2 GB of RAM).

On 32-bit systems, you have to do a lot of manual tuning of loader.conf
tunables to limit how much memory ZFS can use.  But on 64-bit systems
running FreeBSD 7.2 or newer, with at least 2 GB of RAM, it can auto-tune
itself (although you still need to disable prefetch).

I'd recommend giving it a test run.  You might be surprised.  :)  Or it
might not work in your situation.  :)
-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com