My First JBOD: Introduction

This is me set­ting up a JBOD for use by one or more XEN hosts, using pro­fes­sional hard­ware. It’s not a hack, not throw­ing a shit­load of dri­ves into a PC with some “pro­sumer” SATA RAID cards that require you spend weeks fuss­ing with dri­vers and firmware to get even a min­i­mal write per­for­mance out of their under­pow­ered hard­ware RAID.

A for­mer room­mate of mine once setup such a beast using a 12-port SATA card which ended up deliv­er­ing a whop­ping 1 MBps of write speed in a RAID 5 con­fig­u­ra­tion. I sim­ply don’t have time to play around like that these days, so this is me trad­ing cap­i­tal for time.

The host machine is a Sun Fire X4200M2 server with an inter­nal RAID10, run­ning a RHEL 5.3 XEN instal­la­tion. None of the ser­vices cur­rently run­ning on this box are crit­i­cal, which means I can take them down for an hour at the end of the day with­out trou­ble, pro­vided I can get them back up again. I also have the (Memorial Day) week­end to get the new JBOD up and run­ning on this box.

After it’s up, how­ever, I will be host­ing impor­tant business-ey things on var­i­ous vir­tual machines using this JBOD: e-mail, website(s), inter­nal wiki, NAS, along with pri­mary ker­beros, LDAP, cob­bler, pup­pet on the inter­nal RAID; so it’s fairly impor­tant that this get up and work­ing, and be sta­ble once it’s going…

The JBOD itself is a Sun StorageTek J4200 array with a sin­gle IO mod­ule and a PCIe SAS RAID card, run­ning 6x 1TB SATA disks in (even­tu­ally) a RAID6 array. I’d like to play around with inter­est­ing things like redun­dant SATA mul­ti­pathing, but I’m pretty new to the whole stor­age admin area, so I’m not going to be play­ing around with those things on *this* setup…

2 Responses

  1. Ahmed Kamal says:
    2009-05-24 at 2:43 am

    Hi,
    What’s the pur­pose of run­ning a Xen instal­la­tion ? Are you plan­ning on serv­ing files from a Xen guest ? If so, would you con­sider run­ning an open­so­laris dis­tro for its ZFS capa­bil­i­ties! I am really inter­ested in this exact setup, if you’re too, please let me know. Especially assign­ing raw disk access to the Xen guest.

  2. James Cape says:
    2009-05-24 at 12:30 pm

    Virtualization? Eventually I will be plan­ning on serv­ing files from the Xen guest, but I’m not going to assign it a raw disk per-se. The plan is to run the guests out of disk images inside LV stored on the JBOD (just as I’m doing on the inter­nal array already).

    I don’t know any­where near enough about OpenSolaris or ZFS to trust my company’s core ser­vices to it.

Leave a Reply

*