OpenSolaris on Gigabyte GA-P965-S3

Now that I have a new box to run ESXi, I’ve repurposing my GA-P965-S3 based system for OpenSolaris.  I had a lot of trouble getting this to work.  I was initially using OpenSolaris 2008.11.  I could get it installed.  Reboot, login screen comes up.  I plug in my credentials and as soon as the password entry box dissappeared, lockup.  Mouse stops responding, keyboard stops responding.  I tried every bios setting, disabling everything, etc.  Tried different drives, different video card.  Even tried my LSI SAS card instead of the onboard SATA.  Finally I recalled reading a post somewhere that someone was having issues with 4gb of RAM.  So I brought the system down to 2gb and BAM it worked.  Soon after all this, 2009.06 came out.  I installed that and it worked fine with 4gb of memory.  All 6 onboard SATA ports worked.

For drives, I have 2 – 750gb from my old Win2k3 based fileserver.   I also had the 4 – 1.5tb Seagate drives that came with my Opteron box.   I am allocating 2 – 50gb partitions on the 750gb drives for OS, and carving the rest out for a mirrored data partition.  The 4 – 1.5tb drives are going to be in a raidz.

The OS installer doesn’t allow you create a mirror to start with.  I followed Darkstar’s post on creating a bootable root mirror and it worked great.  You can only do this with slices, not entire disks.  The OpenSolaris installer gives you the option of creating slices or using the entire disk, so remember to use slices if you want to create a mirror.

Creating the raidz is very simple.  In one command I had 4tb of useable storage with all the awesomeness of ZFS and RAIDZ.  I ran some simple benchmarks on a single 500gb drive (non-mirrored) and my new 4tb RAIDZ using FileBench.  The results of the benchmark are below.  This confirms my RAIDZ is quite a bit faster than the single disk.

I started to offload data from my old Win2k3 fileserver onto the new RAIDZ.  I added OpenSolaris to the domain and created a CIFS (windows friendly) share.   Tim Thomas’ blog has a good post on how to do this.  I did find out of the box, it didn’t like my Win2k8 domain controller.  I decided to just remove that machine from my domain while I work out the initial setup.  I’ll probably revisit this later.  Permissions appear to be another tricky part of CIFS I’m going to come back to.

Unfortunately after a few hundred gigs of transfer, 1 of the 1.5 tb drives failed.  The RAIDZ kept on going, but soon after the first drive failure, the second drive started showing errors.   I used the Ultimate Boot CD and confirmed both drives are indeed failing.  1 of which is making click of death noises, the other appears to be on the way to failure.  I opted to go with Seagate’s Advanced Replacement and pay $20 per drive so I could get everything back up and running quickly.  There should be a discount for multiple drives.  Also, paying for this at all on a drive that is a few months old kind of stinks.

Here are the benchmark results:

Throughput breakdown (ops per second)

Bandwidth breakdown (MB/s)