[Cialug] Writeup soon - ZFS SAN build

[Matt Breitbach]

So my boss ordered me parts to start on an OpenSolaris ZFS SAN box.  I'm
going to be documenting my progress and the hurdles I've encountered.

The primary plan is to share it via iSCSI, since that's what plays with
Windows the best (I'd love to do NFS, but Win2k8R2 doesn't play so well with
that mixed with Hyper-V from what I can understand).  Eventually we will be
adding an Infiniband card and exporting it via iSCSI over Infiniband,
possibly FC over Infiniband if I can get the encapsulation to work right and
get proper driver support. 

Anyone want to have a hand in playing with the new toys?  So far I think
I've got everything worked out, and my tests on older hardware have worked
well, but there's always the possibility that OpenSolaris just won't boot
from the disk, in which case I'll be good and stuck!

FYI - parts that are on there way : 


http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=5440&lastcatid=53&step=4
http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=3236&step=4
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139043
http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=4518&step=4
http://www.acmemicro.com/estore/merchant.ihtml?pid=6708&step=4
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117187
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835203002

The plan is to load it up with two tiny SSD drives for boot : 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025

Two cache drives : 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167017

and two log drives : 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167013

All cache drives, log drives and boot drives will be RAID1 mirrors.

The rest of the chassis will be populated with 2TB SATA drives in a RAID10
style configuration (via ZFS).  Hopefully there will be enough speed on the
caching and logging drives to make up for the SATA drives on the backend.

Anyway, parts should be in next week is my guess.  If anyone that's
knowledgeable in OpenSolaris would like to help me poke at it drop me a
line.

Further down the line we plan on deploying additional systems as JBOD
chassis behind this one, and possibly building something similar using all
SSD drives instead of rotating media.