Saturday, March 30, 2013

(IPMP vs LACP) vs MPIO

If you're running an illumos or Solaris-based distribution for your ZFS needs, especially in a production environment, you may find yourself wanting to aggregate multiple network interfaces either for performance, redundancy, or both. With Solaris, your choices are not limited to standard LACP.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

ZVOL Used Space

One of the more common complaints I hear about with ZFS is when clients are using zvol's to offer up iSCSI or FC block targets to clients, formatting filesystems on them, and then using them. Well, I don't get complaints about that, so much.. what I get are complaints about how, over time, the 'used' space as visible in ZFS is completely out of whack with the used space as visible in the filesystem on the client.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Nexenta - SMTP Server Settings

A common problem for users of NexentaStor, especially home users and people doing a trial evaluation of the software, is that, at least as of 3.1.3.5, it requires a real SMTP server somewhere else in order to send email. I'm often told no email was set up because no SMTP server or account was available (at home, this is often just permanently true, and in the enterprise this is often true during eval phases). This is bad - NexentaStor sends all sorts of alerts via email that it does not display anywhere else. Your appliance may be warning you of something, and you'll have no idea. There is a workaround, however, if the appliance can get to the internet and you have GMail (or can be bothered to set up an account)!

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Reservation & Ref Reservation - An Explanation (Attempt)

So in this article I'm going to try to explain and answer a lot of the questions I get and misconceptions I see in terms of ZFS and space utilization of a pool. Not sure how well I'm going to do here, I've never found a holy grail way of explaining these that everyone understands - seems like one way works with one person, and a different way is necessary for the next guy, but let's give it a shot.

VM Disk Timeouts

A pretty common issue to run into when using some SAN back-ends for virtual machines is that the VM's end up crashing, BSOD'ing, or (most commonly) remounting their "disks" read-only when there's a hiccup or failover in the storage system, often resulting in a need to reboot to restore functionality.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

ZFS: Read Me 1st

Things Nobody Told You About ZFS

Yes, it's back. You may also notice it is now hosted on my Blogger page - just don't have time to deal with self-hosting at the moment, but I've made sure the old URL redirects here.

So, without further adieu..