On “enterprise” Sun hardware, you can do nifty tricks like blink LED lights on disks to identify where logical disk names like c8t2d0 resides as Matty pointed out in the blog post here. But what if you’re stuck on crufty (cheaper) regular SATA drives without the sexy LED support? How do you find c8t2d0 amongst [...]
I came across a link to Dave Lutz’s Partition Alignment Guidelines for Unified Storage blog post while catching up on zfs-discuss today. Aligning partitions correctly can make a HUGE performance difference, and it’s amazing how many people are unaware of the consequences of not laying out their partitions to align with the storage they are [...]
The Sun T5220 comes with a built-in RAID controller, which supports all of the standard RAID levels (0 – 6). Configuring one or more devices to participate in a RAID Configuration is dead simple, since you can use the Solaris raidctl utility. The last T5220 I configured had a root file system that was going [...]
I have been playing around with the COMSTAR iSCSI and FC port providers for the past few months, and other than a number of problems with the emlxs driver, they appear to work pretty well. As I’ve been experimenting, I wanted to back up my configuration in case something happened to my server. COMSTAR uses [...]
I just saw the following opensolaris putback notice: PSARC/2009/394 SATA Framework Port Multiplier Support 6422924 sata framework has to support port multipliers 6691950 ahci driver needs to support SIL3726/4726 SATA port multiplier This is awesome news, and I’m hopeful this will allow me to use one of my external SATA enclosures with OpenSolaris. Time to [...]
With project COMSTAR, you can present logical units to one or more hosts connected via Ethernet or fibre channel. Logical units are managed with the sbdadm utility, which has options to add, delete, list, import and modify logical units. To create a logical unit using a ZFS volume, the path to the ZFS volume can [...]
