Active4 years, 4 months ago

I'm trying to set up some homegrown storage using a desktop motherboard, 4 x SATA drives and 2 x SSD drives.

I'd really like to use NexentaStor for its nice web interface and for it is some production-ready status, but I also want to use ZIL and L2ARC on my storage to speed things up.

To install it, you only have to choose a location and timezone, as well as to select the target hard disk drive. Bottom line In conclusion, NexentaStor Community Edition is a decent unified storage solution based on the Solaris operating system. To install NexentaStor through a USB flash drive: 1. Download the NexentaStor image from www.nexenta.com. Copy it onto a USB flash drive. Set the system BIOS to load from the USB ports first. Reboot the system. Go to Installation to install NexentaStor. And old Nexenta install for example. Erase their partitions and you will be good go go. So we need to select a redundancy for our pool. You can see I have selected Non-Redundant – home lab and not much disk. Now we click on the green drive icons with the + sign.

I plan to partition both SSDs as 4 partitions (OS, swap, ZIL, L2ARC), put NexentaStor on mirror made of 1st partitions of each SSD, ZIL on mirror made of 3rd partitions, and added both 4th partitions as two L2ARC devices. Then I plan to create RAID-Z2 pool, add ZIL and 2 x L2ARC to it.

The problem is, NexentaStor won't partition and drive it uses. So I can't simply 'break' SSDs for some partitions, I need to use the whole SSD drive for one purpose, which is not a good idea since SSD are too big for 'just boot me up' usage.

So, the question is: are there any way I can setup NexentaStor with ZIL and L2ARC using 4 x SATA HDD and 2 x SSD?

P.S. I was successful to do the same setup under FreeBSD, so there is no any ZFS limitation on that (no wonder about).

P.P.S. I'm not sure but what if I use Solaris LiveCD to per-partition SSD and try to install Nexentra on it but if it is possible at all?

ewwhiteNexentastor Install To Usb Drive
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Nexentastor Install To Usb DriveAlexanderAlexander
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1 Answer

I'd suggest dedicated drives for OS and dedicated disks for data. NexentaStor is software RAID and the loss of an OS disk can be painful. You can combine L2ARC and ZIL, but the class of SSDs you're probably using won't be helpful as ZIL devices.

Nexentastor install to usb driver

I understand the desire to try to use all of these ZFS features, but you really have to do it the right way. I run many ZFS systems without L2ARC because it's often not necessary for the application or I/O patterns. Try to maximize RAM first.

Nexentastor Install To Usb Drive Drive

The partitioning of the SSDs for ZIL and ARC can be done from the command line using parted. You would also need to add them to the zpool via the CLI.

ewwhiteewwhite

Nexentastor Install To Usb Drivers

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Nexentastor Install To Usb Driver

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