(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.

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.

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.

Sub-$1K Followup - Learning and Tuning

So as of a few hours ago, I've finally migrated everything off the old home SAN and onto the new one. I'll be updating that post a bit later with the promised pictures, but I must say, I am neither a photographer nor a superior case wiring guy.