ZFS dedupe performance hit? (and implications for dedupe on 7110)

[dhicks]

Give VirtualBox a try, worked first time for me.

Nope, no luck here. OpenSolaris refuses to boot any further than a GRUB command prompt. I've tried running it on the bare server, as an HVM Xen VM and as a VirtualBox VM on my desktop - same results every time. Hmm, maybe a corrupt ISO? I'm currently donwloading osol-dev-131-x86.iso from Genunix sintead, see if I get anywhere with that.

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

/usr/bin/updimg.sh

This script fails to run on my backup server. In the end, I figured out this was due to a lack of RAM. The LiveCD boots and assigns /tmp to a RAM disk. The script above then tries to decompress the filesystem on the CD to /tmp, so if you don't have enough RAM it fills up and breaks. A VirtualBox VM with 1.5GB of RAM assgined seems to work okay (the backup server has 1GB of RAM), so it looks like around 1.5GB is a sensible minimum to use this script.

EON is a good idea, but I don't think it's quite suitible for what I want to do - I don't really want to have to rebuild the boot file system every time I make a settings change, and I want to be able to setup Samba and install rsync without to much effort.

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David Hicks

[j17sparky]

Nope, no luck here. OpenSolaris refuses to boot any further than a GRUB command prompt. I've tried running it on the bare server, as an HVM Xen VM and as a VirtualBox VM on my desktop - same results every time. Hmm, maybe a corrupt ISO? I'm currently donwloading osol-dev-131-x86.iso from Genunix sintead, see if I get anywhere with that.

--
David Hicks

Ive found the 64bit versions wont boot, infact ive even had it crash my host pc! 32bit has worked just fine.

[dhicks]

Ive found the 64bit versions wont boot

I checked the MD5 checksum, turned out to be a corrupt ISO image. I've now downloaded and installed 2009.06 (the latest release version booted but crashed on GUI login), updated it to the current dev version (er, I think - to a version that supports ZFS with deduplication support, anyway, which is what this is all in aid of in the first place) and managed to create a 6-disk RAID-Z array with dedupe switched on. Now I just have to get Samba working...

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David Hicks

[apaton]

I think - to a version that supports ZFS with deduplication supports

Check your ZFS Version

apaton@osol:~$ zpool upgrade -v
This system is currently running ZFS pool version 22.

The following versions are supported:

VER  DESCRIPTION
---  --------------------------------------------------------
 1   Initial ZFS version
 2   Ditto blocks (replicated metadata)
 3   Hot spares and double parity RAID-Z
 4   zpool history
 5   Compression using the gzip algorithm
 6   bootfs pool property
 7   Separate intent log devices
 8   Delegated administration
 9   refquota and refreservation properties
 10  Cache devices
 11  Improved scrub performance
 12  Snapshot properties
 13  snapused property
 14  passthrough-x aclinherit
 15  user/group space accounting
 16  stmf property support
 17  Triple-parity RAID-Z
 18  Snapshot user holds
 19  Log device removal
 20  Compression using zle (zero-length encoding)
 21  Deduplication
 22  Received properties

For more information on a particular version, including supported releases, see:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/version/N

Where 'N' is the version number.

[dhicks]

Check your ZFS Version

Done that - setting dedupe failed with a "must upgrade" message, so I upgraded and all seems fine.

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David Hicks