Share resources between 2 hosts

N

nORKy

Hi,

I have a problem. I have a poor host with 3GB of RAM, a old dual-core processor, and a zpool with 16T of space disk. I can't upgrade it, no more RAM. I have a second host with 36GB of RAM, a new quad-core processor. I can't connect the 16TB pool to the second host. I need the cores and RAM of the second host to work with the 16TB of the first host. How can I do that? NFS/iSCSI? But the first has only 3GB of RAM for the 16TB.
 
Hi,

You've not really said what your requirements are, 3GB of RAM is enough to export the pool as NFS or configure iSCSI.

If the concern is over performance, then of course you will be negatively impacted by not having the pool locally conneted to the second server. The only semi-wacky thing I can think you could try if you want to use better the 36GB RAM to improve disk performance is export the physical disks on the first server via iSCSI then import the zpool onto the second server. You can then take advantage of the 36GB RAM by setting the ARC very big, obviously this isn't ideal if you actually need to use the zpool on the first server.

It seems other people have tried such a config with some success, I've not tested it myself,

Thanks, Andy.
 
I don't need to use the pool on the first server. The problem is that I can't connect the pool to the second. That's all. The first is here only to connect the big storage. But you said I can export all disks on the first via iSCSI and import onto the second?

I don't understand how do that?
 
The idea would be to export the zpool on the first host, then configure each physical disk under istgt, then on the second disk connect to all the physical disks with iSCSI initiator. At that point all the physical disks should appear as locally attached disks on the second server, then you can do a zpool import of the pool on the second host.

As I said, it won't help get around the performance hit of transferring data over the network, but it will allow you to have a huge ARC cache on the second server that will help imporve performance.

ta Andy.

PS If you want to err on the side of caution/reliability I'd just NFS export it from the first server.
 
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