I've currently got a storage server running Oracle Solaris Express 11 with 12x1tb disks. It currently provides two functions: 1) Providing a datastore for a small vSphere 4.1 farm over NFS and 2) providing a network share for a team over SMB.
The advantages in ZFS are obvious for the uses we've had so far. However, we're starting to look at where the single points of failure are and investigate eliminating them.
An obvious single point of failure is the NAS itself. If there's a software or hardware issue involving Solaris or the NAS hardware, this takes the entire storage pool offline. We've got the budget to buy another equivalent chassis+disks, but what are my software options for clustering these together and making the storage pool more available?
I've read some stuff around HAStorage+ as a piece of software that can do storage clustering, but can that also cluster the NFS and SMB services across both nodes? Can I expect a solution which implements automatic failover?
Finally, are there any decent guides to how to set this up?
Best Answer
Unfortunately, I don't think you will be able to cluster them in the normal sense as zfs is not a clustered fs. Look at zfs snapshotting as a way to replicate your data. I believe the commands are zfs send and zfs recv.