Posts filed under 'Solaris'
Sun Fire x4500 Thumper: Recommended ZFS Zpool Layout
The x4500 comes with 48 disks, two of which you typically use as a mirrored ZFS pair for the host OS, leaving 46 drives for data. One of the questions you’re faced with, is how to efficiently lay out your zpool configuration to balance performance, reliability and capacity.
For the particular workload we’ll be using the x4500 for, we want a balance across all 3. No particular factor wins out over the others – they’re all equally important. To further complicate matters, the box has six 8-channel SATA controllers, so you want to spread your workload across the controllers in an intelligent fashion.
There are many differing opinions on this. I sparked a debate on #solaris on Freenode posing the question, with some suggesting a single zpool with collection of mirrors if databases are involved, 1 drive per controller. Others suggested lots of small raidz2 sets in a single zpool.
After expirementing, musing, and researching on the web, we finally settled on the following configuration, which provides a fair balance:
pool: zpool01
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
zpool01 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2 ONLINE 0 0 0
c4t7d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t7d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t7d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t7d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t7d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t7d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c3t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c6t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c5t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c1t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c0t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
spares
c4t2d0 AVAIL
c4t6d0 AVAIL
This gives 2 spares, and 11 drives across 4 raidz2 groups. The chances of 3 drives failing in a 11 disk raidz2 pool before the spares finish rebuilding are (hopefully!) fairly low. In the unlikely event that 3 drives did fail, they’d more than likely be spread across the 4 raidz2 groups. It’s all about managing risk.
The command to create this would be:
zpool create zpool01 raidz2 c{4,3,6,5,1,0}t1d0 c{3,6,5,1,0}t0d0
zpool add zpool01 raidz2 c{4,3,6,5,1,0}t3d0 c{3,6,5,1,0}t2d0
zpool add zpool01 raidz2 c{4,3,6,5,1,0}t5d0 c{3,6,5,1,0}t4d0
zpool add zpool01 raidz2 c{4,3,6,5,1,0}t7d0 c{3,6,5,1,0}t6d0
zpool add zpool01 spare c4t2d0 c4t2d6
Finally, this inspiration for this configuration came from the Joyent web blog. Those guys know their stuff and have been using ZFS in production for longer than most.
Add comment November 16th, 2008
Sun release new Apache Module mod_privileges for Solaris
Nick Kew, who works for Sun on their Web Stack project, has just posted on the Webstack Discuss Mailing List about an exciting new Solaris-specific Apache HTTPD module they have been working on. Rather than paraphrase, he posted:
I’ve just introduced mod_privileges to Apache HTTPD trunk.
This is a platform-specific module for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, that makes the webserver privileges(5)-aware. This enables the server to be run with enhanced security, and with different settings per virtual host.
The feature likely to be of most interest is that it enables different virtual hosts to run under different Unix user and group IDs, using the VHostUser and VHostGroup directives. This is the capability once promised by the “perchild” MPM.
It has one major drawback: it is not suitable for a threaded MPM. However, it is ideally suited for use with PHP, which of course also precludes threads. It should also be of interest to anyone hosting other in-process scripting environments such as mod_perl, mod_python or mod_ruby, or application modules.
This is a really exciting module. Being able to give each VirtualHost it’s own user and group is a killer feature for shared hosting companies, who traditionally have had the nightmare of all PHP scripts running under the Apache user. Although solutions exist, such as php-suexec, they are cumbersome and CGI based, and thus typically slow or memory/process intensive. This kind of Apache module sounds like it has the potential to offer a really slick way of solving this particular problem.
Unfortunately it’s in the Apache HTTPD 2.3 trunk, so yet to be released into the wild. But I’m looking forward to this becoming production-ready in a future release.
Add comment November 14th, 2008
Adding mcrypt Support to Sun’s CoolStack
A very boring first post – but I thought I’d blog about this since it’s fresh in my mind!
Sun’s Web Stack – CoolStack
We’ve been using Solaris in an ever increasing way here at EveryCity for a while now. Solaris is an excellent operating system for many reasons, and I’ll no doubt be blogging about it plenty in the weeks and months to come. But one of the key areas Solaris currently lags behind Linux with is the availability of well made, precompiled packages of popular open source software. A very large number of servers these days are deployed to run web services, including Apache, PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, etc, and installing this on Linux can be as simple as “yum install apache php mysql”.
So Sun set out to provide a solution to this on Solaris – enter CoolStack. CoolStack has a good selection of software, including:
- Apache HTTP Server
- PHP Hypertext Processor
- MySQL Database
- Perl Scripting Language
- Ruby (Including rubygems and rails)
- Tomcat J2EE/Java Web Server
- Squid Caching Proxy Server
The PHP package includes a good selection of libraries, so you can get started straight out of the box.
Adding mcrypt Support to PHP on CoolStack 1.3.1
One of the things that CoolStack is missing however is the mcrypt extension, which is used in a number of PHP applications, for example PHPMyAdmin. I was surprised this was missed out, as so many others are included. However it’s not too hard to add this ourself. This example is for CoolStack 1.3.1, but assuming the stack doesn’t change too much, the principles should be the same.
Compiling libmcrypt
Head on over to http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcrypt and download the latest libmcrypt source. You’ll need a healthy development environment, which I’m hoping to blog about in a future post (Hint: Grab Sun Studio 11 and put /opt/SUNWspro/bin at the front of your path).
You’ll want to choose a sensible place to install libmcrypt to – since I was producing a package for deployment to other servers, I chose “/opt/libs/libmcrypt”, but where you place this is up to you – “/opt/coolstack” is another suitable PREFIX path.
Let’s now compile and install libmcrypt (Using cc rather than gcc):
unset CC LDFLAGS CFLAGS export CC=cc ./configure --prefix=/opt/libs/libmcrypt --enable-dynamic-loading \ --with-included-algos=cast-128,gost,rijndael-128,twofish,arcfour,cast-256,loki97,rijndael-192,saferplus,wake,blowfish-compat,des,rijndael-256,serpent,xtea,blowfish,enigma,rc2,tripledes make make install
Et Voilà! You now have libmcrypt installed. If your compiler barfs, post a printout of what you get in the comments and I’ll assist if I can.
Compiling the php mcrypt extension
Assuming you have already downloaded, installed and configured CoolStack, all we need to do is fetch two CoolStack source packages. Nip on over to http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/, click the link to download, and choose “Source” as the Platform.
Download and install CSKruntime_1.3.1_Src.pkg.bz2 and CSKamp_1.3.1_Src.pkg.bz2 – this should place files under /opt/coolstack/src. Now lets compile the mcrypt extension:
cd /opt/coolstack/src/php5/ ./prepare_src cd php-5.2.6/ext/mcrypt /opt/coolstack/php5/bin/phpize ./configure --with-php-config=/opt/coolstack/php5/bin/php-config \ --with-mcrypt=/opt/libs/libmcrypt/ make make install
You can check to make sure the resulting mcrypt.so file is safe to use by doing:
ldd /opt/coolstack/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/mcrypt.so
This should not show any “(file not found)” errors.
Finally, add extension=mcrypt.so to /opt/coolstack/php5/lib/php.ini. Restart Apache (svcadm restart http) – phpinfo(); in a php file should now show a happy mcrypt installation :)
14 comments October 26th, 2008