Sun Microsystems X4540 manual Solaris Configuration, Zpool Configuration

3 Overview Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Solaris Configuration

For this guide, the Sun Fire X4540 server used for ZRM certification was running the Solaris 10 8/07 OS. This is the minimum recommended version to use because various ZFS improvements were introduced in this build.

The Sun Fire X4540 server is powered by up to 8 CPUs operating at 2300 MHz and provides 48 SATA drives with a total capacity close to 50 Tbytes in a 4U enclosure. The two boot drives are mirrored using Solaris Volume Manager with UFS. The rest of the drives are available for backup data.

The default NIC configuration on the Sun Fire X4540 server allows up to four physical Gigabit Ethernet connections to be attached. The connections provide backup ability for up to four separate subnets. Alternatively, the links can be aggregated together using dladm(1M) for improved throughput to a single subnet.

Zpool Configuration

The decision about how to configure zpools needs to be based on a number of factors:

•What is the required performance needed? (IOPS/throughput)

•What is the required data protection level needed? (RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, mirror)

•What is the required capacity?

After gathering and analyzing the requirements, a configuration that balances the needs of those requirements can be chosen.

When configuring the system for network backups, the ability of the Sun Fire X4540 server to receive data over the network is also a factor. For example, a 500-Mbyte/sec backup speed requirement cannot be met solely by using the 4 pre-installed Gigabit Ethernet ports. Additional network cards would be required to accommodate such throughput.

Care should be taken that a system is not over-configured for disk performance, at the expense of space or data protection, when the entire system (encompassing MySQL backup clients and network infrastructure) is not able to send data at adequate levels. Likewise, a system should not be over-configured for space at the expense of performance or data protection.

For the purposes of this guide, the Sun Fire X4540 server was configured with one zpool consisting of 12 drives and 2 spares in a RAIDZ2 configuration. This provided 7 Tbyte of capacity for backups with a very high level of protection against drive failure and performance sufficient to handle 300 to 350 Mbyte/sec of backup traffic over the network.

Using Sun Fire X4540 Server With Zmanda Recovery Manager 2.2 for MySQL Database