On 10/25/2013, 05:00 , centos-request@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> We are a CentOS shop, and have the lucky, fortunate problem of having
> ever-increasing amounts of data to manage. EXT3/4 becomes tough to
> manage when you start climbing, especially when you have to upgrade, so
> we're contemplating switching to ZFS.
>
> As of last spring, it appears that ZFS On Linuxhttp://zfsonlinux.org/
> calls itself production ready despite a version number of 0.6.2, and
> being acknowledged as unstable on 32 bit systems.
>
> However, given the need to do backups, zfs send sounds like a godsend
> over rsync which is running into scaling problems of its own. (EG:
> Nightly backups are being threatened by the possibility of taking over
> 24 hours per backup)
>
> Was wondering if anybody here could weigh in with real-life experience?
> Performance/scalability?
>
> -Ben
FWIW, I manage a small IT shop with a redundant pair of ZFS file servers
running the zfsonlinux.org package on 64-bit ScientificLinux-6
platforms. CentOS-6 would work just as well. Installing it with yum
couldn't be simpler, but configuring it takes a bit of reading and
experimentation. I reserved a bit more than 1GByte of RAM for each
TByte of disk.
One machine (20 useable TBytes in raid-z3) is the SMB server for all of
the clients, and the other machine (identically configured) sits in the
background acting as a hot spare. Users tell me that performance is
quite good.
After about 2 months of testing, there have been no problems whatsoever,
although I'll admit the servers do not operate under much stress. There
is a cron job on each machine that does a scrub every Sunday.
The old ext4 primary file servers have been shut down and the ZFS boxes
put into production, although one of the old ext4 servers will remain
rsync'd to the new machines for a few more months (just in case).
The new servers have the zfsonlinux repositories configured for manual
updates, but the two machines tend to be left alone unless there are
important security updates or new features I need.
To keep the two servers in sync I use 'lsyncd' which is essentially a
front-end for rsync that cuts down thrashing and overhead dramatically
by excluding the full filesystem scan and using inotify to figure out
what to sync. This allows almost-real-time syncing of the backup
machine. (BTW, you need to crank the resources for inotify waaaaay up
for large filesystems with a couple million files.)
So far, so good. I still have a *lot* to learn about ZFS and its
feature set, but for now it's doing the job very nicely. I don't miss
the long ext4 periodic fsck's one bit :-)
YMMV, of course,
Chuck
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