[geeks] Choice of filesystem for /var

[Francois Dion]

On 10/19/06, Miichael Vergalen <mvergall at telenet.be> wrote:
> Well it does if you want to use zpool mirror  on  solaris instead of
> raid1 but I've tried zfs today and it's still not what I need for the
> E4000 ....

I'm running it on everything now, due to more usable disk space and
faster throughput.

But, most interestingly I'm running it on my E5000 at home which is
very very similar to your E4000. How much ram etc? On mine I run many
zones, including an Oracle database. I refresh the database on a
regular basis. I've offlined half my storage due to a ST-D130 going
bad, I got to find a new one. Having only 1 affects performance quite
a bit.

> I've tried it on  the D1000 array first becuase I had a
> couple of disks to play with
I'm assuming your boot disks are internal.

How many disks in that D1000? Do you have it split in 2 busses, each
going to its own X1065A, each X1065A on it's own IO+ card? You would
set aside disks 2,0 and 1,0 for your mirrored zpool and then raidz2
the remaining disks 2,1 1,1 2,2 1,2 2,3 1,3 2,4 1,4 and leave a hot
spare (2,5) and a floater (1,5). Well, if you want that much
redundancy. raidz2 can lose 2 disks and still be ok. I would
personally use all the disks. But do leave your logs separate.

> but as it does not yet export well to other
> clients etc etc...I'll stick with raid1 for now.

What do you mean?


> > If your /var file system is very active or your disks are small, raid1 makes
> > a lot of sense. If it is not very active (how much data do you log?), then
> > just a regular journaled file system would do.
> >
> Daily I log about 800Meg  to a gig on the syslog alone...

That's nothing, with zfs compression that's less than 100MB of actual
write. Most extreme case I've gotten is last week, 3 days of
transactions on a development machine, 275GB of "write" on only 54.9M
write ops. Anyways, back to your issue, zfs with compression is
*perfect* for text logs as they compress so easily.

Francois