ewwhite

Yeah, I have to play the game of deleting the zfs and spl packages, deleting weak-modules and reinstalling on the new kernel. It's expected, but silly.

Huh? I'm not sure I understand.

Hot spares and monitoring. RaidZ2 across that number of drives is a performance nightmare and against ZFS best practices.

This is a simple example setup in a 12-drive enclosure. 9 disks, a global hot-spare disk and two cache drives.

Previously, I would have used straight ZFS mirrors for performance and expandability (raidz VDEVs can't be expanded), but at this scale, the 9-disk 3x3 raidz1 setup consistently outperformed a 10-disk RAID mirror setup in random and sequential I/O.

See: http://i.imgur.com/SeSlmH8.png

This is key. I mean, I focus on the HP side and used ProLiant servers and storage enclosures in my examples... But the Sun/Oracle enclosures and components are very inexpensive off-lease and come at a price-point where it's totally possible to self-support.