Raid-Z in VMWare
Posted by Doomshammer
on Saturday, September 1. 2007
at 16:27
in Anwendungen, Computer, English only, Privat
I finally had some time for playing with Solaris again - especially with ZFS. As I don't want to have another box standing in my living room and making noise, I decided to use a VMWare for playing instead. So I set up a VMWare with 11 hard drives and installed Solaris 10 11/06. Installation went smooth as usual.
First task was to set up a two-way UFS mirror between the first two disks, so that I have a failover when the first disk breaks (of cours, in a vmware this is stupid, as these are only vritual devices - but who cares... it's just for fun
). While creating the mirror, I ran into slight troubles caused by the virtual drives of VMWare. As I didn't choose to allocate the whole disk space during the setup, the disks weren't really touched when I mirrored the partition table with prtvtoc/fmthard. So the created metadb was lost after reboot and caused a OS panic. Deleting the metadb on the 2nd (not yet allocated disk) solved the panic. So I created a filesystem on the 2nd disk, so that disc space got allocated. This finally helped to resolve the metadb/metainit problem.After that I created a Raid-Z to see how it performs within a VMWare - and though these are virtual drives, it performs like hell. All disk access is nicely striped over all 9 discs in the pool. Putting full I/O on the pool gave me this performance results:
QUOTE:
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
----------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
pool1 483M 35.3G 0 1.77K 0 219M
raidz1 483M 35.3G 0 1.77K 0 219M
c1t2d0 - - 0 385 0 27.4M
c1t3d0 - - 0 387 0 27.4M
c1t4d0 - - 0 388 0 27.4M
c1t5d0 - - 0 389 0 27.4M
c1t6d0 - - 0 388 0 27.4M
c1t8d0 - - 0 386 0 27.4M
c1t9d0 - - 0 387 0 27.4M
c1t10d0 - - 0 386 0 27.4M
c1t11d0 - - 0 387 0 27.4M
----------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
I think these are very good results. Going to play a bit more now
