Gmirror/graid or hardware raid?

[Mario Lobo]

Thanks to Paul, Charles and Quartz for your wonderful input and sharing as
much details as possible of your experience.

Paul, your jail/ZFS scenario sounds like a perfect dream, but despite the
fact that all instances in this case will be FBSD, It must be a
 VM environment because testing involves some solutions that run on windows
and different linux distros. But depending on the results for the final
production environment, it may end up coming true.

Charles, I will certainly have a rich exploration territory on all the
things you shared. Since I came into this project with an already
functioning site, I will most certainly be making improvements on the
running site.

Quartz, I'll be booting the host FBSD from a separate smaller drive and
leave the main disks for the guests, so my plan is to do 2 sets of raid1
arrays. As for the fs, I'll try to improve my knowledge of ZFS until I can
feel confident enough to solve any problem that may arise. Well ... since
this is a test env, do you think it would be ok to use one raid array with
the regular ufs2 and the other with zfs?

Again, thank you !
-- 
Mario Lobo
http://www.mallavoodoo.com.br
FreeBSD since version 2.2.8 [not Pro-Audio.... YET!!] (99,7% winfoes FREE)


2015-07-08 18:56 GMT-03:00 Quartz <quartz at sneakertech.com>:

> I thought about zfs but I won't have lots of RAM avaliable.
>>
>
> ZFS doesn't technically NEED gobs of ram just to function, that's a long
> standing urban myth repeated by people who don't understand how the ARC
> and/or dedupe works. You can run ZFS on basically any system, it's just a
> question of how much it can cache. The less it can cache the more it will
> have to hit the disks.... but that applies to basically every filesystem.
>
> As for raid level, you only have four disks so you don't have a lot of
> options. You're pretty much looking at a raid-1, raid-10 or raid-5/raidz-1.
> A 4-way raid-1 is I think overkill, and a bunch of VMs will be heavy on the
> random read/write so a raid-5/raidz-1 will be worse than a raid-10
> performance wise. (Although with only a four disk array the difference
> probably won't be earth shattering, so if you really need the space a 5/z1
> won't kill you).
>
>