SUMMARY: ZFS ready for prime time ?

Rob McMahon wrote:
> I'm looking to set up a home directory server for a population of 
> ~50,000 registered users, ~20,000 active, with about 1TB of storage. The 
> machine should last something like 3-5 years. The future is clearly ZFS, 
> quotas being done by having a filesystem per person with quotas being 
> implemented by putting a limit on the space per filesystem.  It's all a 
> bit new for my comfort zone, though, and I was wondering if anyone out 
> there was doing this.  Issues I see are NFS exports: I've seen reports 
> about bad things happening due to the commit to disk semantics, and 
> backups: we use Legato Networker, and whilst it backs up one or two ZFS 
> filesystems without issue (once you've set mountpoint=legacy and put the 
> filesystems in vfstab) I can't see it coping with 50,000 filesystems on 
> any reasonable basis.
>   
Looks like that'll be a no, then.  Thanks to DRoss-Smith for pointing me 
at http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/, Slides for SVOSUG: Real World 
OpenSolaris, and to David Magda for reminding me of 
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss, which really 
seems to be the best source for zfs information.  Legato NetWorker will 
currently only backup zfs filesystem if you list them individually, and 
this is absolutely a non-starter, and means I'm essentially stuck.  
They're saying the Autumn for proper support, which is too late for us.  
The NFS issue is reportedly fixed in the latest versions, but there are 
apparently issues with long boot times when you have thousands of mount 
points.

I need per-user quotas, so I can't just have a handful of ZFS 
filesystems, so good old UFS it is, sadly.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
E-Mail:	Rob.McMahon@warwick.ac.uk		PHONE:  +44 24 7652 3037
Rob McMahon, IT Services, Warwick University, Coventry, CV4 7AL, England
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers