@lindsay.at

This is a followup to the first in the series.

After an encouraging comment to my last OpenSolaris blog entry, I decided to do what was necessary to make a patched ZFS boot installer. I used the Netinstall script/procedure from Lori Alt. The name is a bit misleading, as I was able to run the install from a DVD, as I'm usually comfortable doing.

The actual install was much easier than expected, and – because of the pfinstall procedure – much more efficient than the usual rigamarole I go through. Creating the modified boot DVD was the hard part, and really, that was mostly in the logistics of moving DVD images back and forth. I would

• download the DVD segments to my desktop,
• assemble the pieces, (really, I have to complain about Sun's download policy: it really gets in the way when trying to do this kind of work.)
• upload to the Solaris box, (and try again with newly split files because of a 2GB limit),
• mount the ISO image,
• copy the image to a working directory,
• apply the patch, and include a draft install profile on disk,
• create a bootable ISO image, and
• move it (in pieces) from the server room to the MacBook Pro so I can actually burn it.

Google led me to Tom Haynes' blog, and the linked entry along with the followups that follow in sequence give enough magic sauce to get a bootable/installable ISO image. With the disk burned, installation was a snap. And a ZFS boot disk… simply works. (I do need to dig deeper into arranging a ZVOL or some such as a dump volume. At the moment, it's on one of the unused array disks.)

When I last saw the machine, I had started running Bonnie-64 on it, and looked good so far. I hope to have very comprehensive test results to post.

In my previous entry, I vowed to give more details about the hardware.

My requirements were to come up with high-density, high-throughput, easy-to-manage storage on a budget. This will be doing multimedia streaming all the way up to (potentially uncompressed) Hi-Def. It's not your typical mailserver, in other words. My interest in ZFS has been in its reliability, ease-of-administration, and conceptual simplicity: disks are dumb and all too prone to failure. If an all-software solution allows me not to worry about the disks and not put the workload onto another point of failure between the application and the hardware (read: RAID cards die, get old, and obsolete), then I'm all for it.

A local systems integrator (with whom my department has had a long relationship) provided the system, and collaborated a fair bit on the specifications (but he readily admits that Solaris is not his speciality).

We started with the chassis: Steve works fairly exclusively with PCICase, and recommended their 16× SATA drive chassis in a 3U rackmount. It's a bit anonymously black, but it certainly looks like it will do the job of high-density storage on a budget.

After going back and forth, we settled on a motherboard from Tyan. The S2892 seemed just the ticket, and got a thumbs-up from the ZFS list. Unfortunately, Steve couldn't find the board from any of his suppliers, because it's apparently been end-of-lifed. He suggested the S3892 (Tyan Thunder K8HM) in its place. Having seen some measure of support for the southbridge controllers on the HCL (thanks to Paul Richards) from a kissing-cousin relative of the new motherboard, I agreed.

Originally, Steve proposed a 3.0GHz dual-core Opteron. I wanted something cheaper with more cores (cos Solaris tends to handle that rather well), so we ended up agreeing on two dual-core AMD Opteron 275 (2.2GHz) processors.

Combine this with 8GB RAM, dual boot drives (internal to the case, connected to the motherboard), 2× Supermicro's AOC-SAT2-MV8 SATA 8 port RAID controller, 16× 500GB Seagate SATA hard drives, and we have a pretty serious 8 Terabyte system for under £5000. The question at this point is how serious. I'm waiting for benchmark results to tell me just that.

I, like Blackfriars, am holding on to my hope that next week's iPod announcement will offer the beginnings of Apple's high-definition strategy. Blackfriars asks, "High-definition video putting the special in next week's Apple Special Event?":

Speaking of the Internet bringing the end of TV as we know it, everyone seems to be expecting new music and iPod offerings at the Apple Special Event in Moscone Center on September 5. But what has gone more or less unnoticed is the fact that Akamai, Apple's long-time Internet content partner, has announced that it is adding high-definition video to its Internet distribution offerings.

A coincidence? Perhaps. But add the fact that Apple TV, a product whose revenue is being recognized as a 24-month subscription model like the iPhone, sports high-definition outputs, yet has no high-definition iTunes content yet, and you've got a high-definition shoe ready to drop sometime; the only question is when.

Well, I've been wondering the same thing. Back in April, I outlined that it's certainly technically feasible: There's a new extension to H.264 that allows an additional video stream to enhance the basic stream that's there. iPods and iPhones would only need to sync with the basic 640×360 pixel stream that the iTunes store already delivers. An AppleTV, Intel-based Mac, or G5 Mac would be able to read both video streams at once, combine them, and show 720p high definition.

I could once again be blinded by the possible and the (personally) desirable over "likely." Apple could well excite people enough with the new iPods. The movie studios may well be holding out for rentals (though Blackfriars has some thoughts on that, as well) before handing Apple the keys to the HD castle as well. The combination of the Beatles, new iPods, and Hi-Def may well be too much for such an event: Hi-Def may not materialise this year.

But I'm hoping.

(Via The Macalope.)

I took delivery of my project's RAID server yesterday. It's a heady bit of hardware, and I'm sure I'll blog about that part soon (once I know what does and doesn't work). The idea was to do some serious RAID (16 spindles), but using the end-to-end software approach from ZFS.

I was debating whether or not I would try to tackle the somewhat baroque instructions for the much more experimental ZFS boot support. I was pretty put off by the instructions, however, so I set them aside. Instead, I jumped in and decided to install using the more familiar UFS/slice method.

So I just got back from setting up one of what I'm sure will be the first of many attempts to get the server configuration just right. And the experience of setting up the fdisk and pdisk slices, with their permanent choice of size, and with the involved UFS mirroring procedure still ahead of me… Well, I think I will give ZFS boot installation a try.