Best practice for high availability ZFS pool

Miroslav Lachman 000.fbsd at quip.cz
Mon May 16 23:06:37 UTC 2016


Palle Girgensohn wrote on 05/17/2016 00:36:
>
>> 16 maj 2016 kl. 15:51 skrev Borja Marcos <borjam at sarenet.es>:
>>
>>
>>> On 16 May 2016, at 12:08, Palle Girgensohn <girgen at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> We need to set up a ZFS pool with redundance. The main goal is high availability - uptime.
>>>
>>> I can see a few of paths to follow.
>>>
>>> 1. HAST + ZFS
>>
>> Which means that a possible corruption causing bug in ZFS would vaporize the data of both replicas.
>>
>>> 3. ZFS replication (zfs snapshot + zfs send | ssh | zfs receive)
>>
>> If you don’t have a hard requirement for synchronous replication (and, in that case, I would opt for a more application
>> aware approach) it’s the best method in my opinion.
>
> That was exactly my thought 18 months ago, and we set up two systems with zfs snapshot + zfs send | ssh | zfs receive. It works, but the problem is it just too slow and a complete sync takes like 10 minutes for all the file systems. We are forced to sync the file systems one at a time to get the kind of control and separation we need. Even if we could speed that up somehow, we are really looking for a more recilient system. Also, constant snapshotting and writing makes scrub very slow so we need to tune down the amount of syncing every fourth week-end to scrub. It's OK but not optimal, so we're pondering for something better.
>
> My first choice is really HAST at the moment, but I also dont find much written in the last couple of years, apart from some articles about setting it up in very minimal testbeds or posts about performance and stability troubles. This makes me wonder, is HAST actively maintained? Is it stable, used and loved by the community? I'd love to hear some success stories with farily large installations of at least 20 TB or so.

I am not using HAST personally but I read about success with HAST and 
ZFS somewhere in FreeBSD mailing lists. I don't have a direct link / 
bookmark for it. Maybe you will find it thru search engine.

Miroslav Lachman


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