anyone played with/used COMSTAR before? i know ZFS has native iSCSI support, but it leaves much to be desired. everything i've heard about COMSTAR has been awesome - you can even do FCoE.

my scenario:
luns presented to the solaris box via FC (from an EVA4400) with everything multipathed
those luns are all in a big zpool
use COMSTAR to present iSCSI luns/NFS mounts/CIFS shares to external hosts over some 802.3ad aggregated nics

nothing too weird... just thought i'd see if i could crowdsource any knowledge.

6/5/2009 10:00:14 AM

yay jargon!

6/5/2009 11:06:58 AM

don't forget if you have it set up that way you'll have to set it LU-3b or you A-55's will probably burn out.

fibre also works well

6/5/2009 11:11:16 AM

I think you and me are probly the only ones knowing what's going on in this thread. what's wrong with openfiler though? do you need ZFS for something or can you just present raw luns to be formatted zfs by the OS/zone you give it to. also, how does it do FCoE when there's no standard or even draft spec out

6/5/2009 11:22:21 AM

there have to be some other people on here who work with SAN storage besides us

there are a lot more things broken in openfiler that i keep finding... i don't think rafiu had ever had anyone use it in a deployment as big as ours, because he kept finding bugs (mainly with LVM and the dm multipath stuff).

ZFS is awesome as hell. main reason i want it is because it natively supports thin provisioning. also, if you want to boost write performance, you can literally just stick a SSD or nvram or something into the zpool, and it'll automatically start using it for the ZIT table (basically exactly what netapp is doing with those super expensive flash cache cards). i thought about using brtfs, but it just isn't as mature as ZFS yet.

basically, you just present the raw LUNs from the EVA to solaris, stick them all in a zpool, and create sparsevolumes in the pool. all you have to do then is give the COMSTAR management stuff the IQN of the target and i think the scsi ID of the lun... and, voila, iscsi.

it's even simpler if you just use the target built into ZFS - all you have to do then is set shareiscsi=on for the sparsevolume and it automatically configures everything else for you.

and i take back the FCoE stuff - i should have said that it will be able to do FCoE in the future - the infrastructure is there already to support it, though, as COMSTAR is basically a universal framework of sorts.

6/5/2009 11:43:13 AM

zfs is awesome and all, but nothing but solaris supports it. you can't even install linux on it. the solaris openstorage platform is kinda cool, til you factor cost in, and it sucks like the rest of them.

6/5/2009 11:47:09 AM

yeah, but i don't need ZFS to support anything but solaris

i'm just pissed at IET because it keeps deciding to crash randomly when we put massive amounts of disk i/o through it.

people are supposedly using solaris with COMSTAR iSCSI (with a thumper though, not FC attached storage) for video editing/render farms and the like... so it sounds like it can handle the throughput.

6/5/2009 11:58:24 AM