RAID

[BrettonWoods]

Dunno there are simple simple gotcha's like if you are going to use Samba4 then quota's and attributes are applied at partition level. So for Samba a separate home is quite essential in most cases.

I don't think it would hurt to provide some details as both the ubuntu and zentyal guided install works really well for desktops but for a server the install choices are a bit dumb.

Its a zentyal thing and up to them but where people are evaluating a product then some considerations to hardware and installation layout wouldn't go amiss.

I feel this should be included at the end of the documentation and as two top tips to zentyal from a user change the developers guide to "customisation and scripting" as many seem to miss that section.


 

[mrdahl2]

Hey thanks for the information. Havnt had much time to play with it yet put its going to replace my server 2003 on my dl380 G2 server soon and was wondering about the RAID.

Thanks
Mrdahl2

[BrettonWoods]

There is one thing I have been playing with on windows clients and I will mention some products just for reference.

I recently purchased 8x 32GB SanDisk ReadyCache SSD that use a nifty bit of software from.
https://www.condusiv.com/partners/oem/technologies/expresscache/

You just stick them in and install the drivers and software and its definately the best addon upgrade that I have ever seen and I started with ICL system 7000's so it's going back a while.

Its a top tip for windows clients and I have never had such a wow from my users for a paltry of £30 each.

So I am going somewhere with this and I am hoping that we might be able to get a kernel upgrade to 3.9 in Zentyal.

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Log-Coming-in-3-9-part-1-Filesystems-and-storage-1831197.html

If we have to wait until Zent4 then fair enough to get 3.9 but sooner rather than later in my books.

Caching algorithms that use a relatively small and cheap SSD do make a huge difference to the system performance and because its a cache they just act on commonly moved data.

I am unsure how they fit into the RAID picture if you get a failure, but haven't read enough yet to see if this can also have redundancy.

I would say 3.9 is important for DDCache alone but BTRFS can't say how much I think its an evolution over EXT4.

Firstly if your a Samba4 user and want server side copies then your backend needs to be BTRFS.
Then because BTFRS acts as one huge disk and holds partitions as subvolumes all the guess work of partition sizing is removed.
Also BTRFS RAID is ridiculously easy to administor.
Finally quota's are at directory level and way more granular.

Doesn't help because we are still on 3.8 but just for those two alone I am making a plea for 3.9 and would be disappointed if its not in 4.0.

Anyone been brave enough and installed 3.9 on Zentyal ?