Possible EON vs FreeNas comparison

[eon]

Tim,

Would it be possible to do a EON vs FreeNas comparison? Or would it be possible to do a review on EON 0.59.1?

Thanks

 

[00Roush]

I will give it a go. How good is the hardware support?

00Roush

 

[00Roush]

So far I have not found a clear tutorial on how to setup a basic install, then setup the disks for use and finally share those over the network. I saw some information about how to install webmin but it only talks about after you have downloaded the software onto the computer. How do I download the software to the computer?

00Roush

 

[eon]

quick start help

00Roush,

Hardware support is not as wide as Freenas. It works on little falls 1,2 boards and a wide list of motherboards with intel, broadcom and some realtek nics. It will basically support anything solaris will run on. If you list your motherboard I'll give it a look over and tell if I see any show stopper(s).

Firs download the latest image from here:
http://eonstorage.blogspot.com/2009/05/eon-zfs-nas-0591-based-on-snv114.html

Based on your hardware and memory you can choose If the 32 (700MB - 1GB) or 64 (1-2Gb) bit image is right for a test. The other choice is between Samba or Sun's CIFS (samba equivalent) server. The quick start guide below has the steps for samba and cifs.

After downloading the iso and burning it to a CD. You can then boot it and install it to USB.

To install to USB
-boot the CD burned
-at login use root/eonsolaris
- create a zpool. Again, I can help here if you share how many disks you have and what type of raid you wish to build. Here's some brief info on creating ZFS pools http://southbrain.com/south/tutorials/zpools.html
-Then check to quick start guide
http://eonstorage.blogspot.com/2009/01/sharing-quick-start-guide.html

Let me know if you have any questions at all. Thanks

 

[00Roush]

I got as far as installing EON CIFS 32bit onto a usb drive last night. Then from there I had no clue how to set things up. I have a general knowledge of how linux works but solaris is definitely its own beast. The sharing quick start guide is what I was trying next but didn't know how to setup a zpool.

I should be able to get a little further now.

Here are the specs of the computer I am starting out with:
Athlon 2400 XP
1GB RAM
FIC AU13 Motherboard (nforce 2 chipset)
Intel PRO/1000 MT PCI network card
ATI Radeon 8500 AGP video card
Just a single 250 GB Seagate IDE drive (~65 MB/sec max read/write)

I had tested out Milax on this machine and it seemed to work well. Once I get EON up on this machine and a little bit of testing done I plan to test EON out on my actual server.

Here are the hardware specs for my current server:
Opteron 165
2GB RAM
ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (ATI RD580 Northbridge and ULi M1575 Southbridge)
Marvel Yukon 88E8053 PCIe network card (onboard)
Marvel Yukon 88E8001 PCI network card (onboard)
ATI Radeon 3450 PCIe video card
Silicon Image 3132 SATA controller (onboard)
Most likely will test out RAID 1 and RAID 0 arrays with 2 WD 320 GB SE16 drives. (~105 MB/sec read/write max )

I'll let you know how far I get with the test system.

00Roush

 

[roamer]

I got as far as installing EON CIFS 32bit onto a usb drive last night. Then from there I had no clue how to set things up. I have a general knowledge of how linux works but solaris is definitely its own beast. The sharing quick start guide is what I was trying next but didn't know how to setup a zpool.

check if the smb server is already online
# svcs smb/server

check if all disks for raid are recognized
# echo|format

create a mirror of two disks with e.g c4t0d0 & c4t1d0 which is called 'pool'
(the name of the disks are listed in the output of the previous command)
# zpool create pool mirror c4t0d0 c4t1d0

check status of the mirror
#zpool status -v

create a filesystem on the mirror
#zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o sharesmb=on pool/public

list filesystems
#zfs list

share it
#zfs set sharesmb=name=sharename pool/public

list shares
#sharemgr show -vp

join a windows-workgroup
#smbadm join -w <workgroupname>

make it accessible for everyone (on OS level)
chmod -R 777 /pool/public

create additional users or at least update the passwd of the current user
#passwd <user>

set quota (optional)
#zfs set quota=60GB pool/public

share also via nfs
#zfs set sharenfs=on pool

 

[eon]

Setting up zpool

00Roush,

Your motherboard looks fine. If Milax works then EON should work fine or I can ad the needed drivers. You are using one disk which is fine too for testing.

so the we need to see if the machine/solaris sees the hard drive

as root run format < /dev/null OR echo | format

you will see something like
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0t0d0 <SUN18G cyl 7506 alt 2 hd 19 sec 248>
/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/scsi@2/sd@0,0
1. c0t1d0 <SUN9.0G cyl 4924 alt 2 hd 27 sec 133>
/pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/scsi@2/sd@1,0
Specify disk (enter its number):


we are interested in the cXtXdX part to build the zpool
if the disk we want is c0t1d0 and we will build a pool called rush (NOTE this will erase all data on the drive)
zpool create rush c0t1d0

successful completion means the pool is built and you can proceed with the quick start guide
these commands should now produce info
zfs list
zpool list

 

[00Roush]

I got a share up and running yesterday on my test machine. My first results looked good as I was able to read and write a 2.63 GB at about 45 MB/sec. After that for some reason speeds dropped to around 20-25 MB/sec. I have tried resetting up the zpool but it doesn't seem to change things. Any thoughts?

00Roush

 

[eon]

Not sure

Can you do zpool iostat -v 1 while doing a write only transfer and paste back approx 15-20secs worth of output? Repeat with a read only. If possible one with a simultaneous read and write.

also can you run diskspeed.sh and post the output.

thanks

 

[dje007]

Can't boot the cd gets to grub then hangs, have check the md5 sum with the web the cd is good.

 

[eon]

Boot verbose

press e at splash screen.
change
unix
to
unix -m verbose
or for more verbosity
unix -v
press enter then b for boot. if you can report as closely or screen shot where it fails.

can also try to boot in stages to see if the kernel loads.
1 unix -m milestone=none
2 unix -m milestone=single-user
3 unix -m milestone=multi-user

 

[00Roush]

Can you do zpool iostat -v 1 while doing a write only transfer and paste back approx 15-20secs worth of output? Repeat with a read only. If possible one with a simultaneous read and write.

also can you run diskspeed.sh and post the output.

thanks

Here is a link to the output of my zpool iostat -v 1 tests for read, write, and both. http://www.mediafire.com/file/zgra5ymm1zi/tests.zip

diskspeed.sh out put was ...
c1d0 66 MB/sec
c0t0d0 19 MB/sec

Thanks,
00Roush

 

[eon]

Trying to analyse

00Roush,

These transfers were over the network or a local copy? Seems like over the network.

Hmmm, this could be the performance with this board and one drive. One way to test would be to add the x86.eon from the samba image(/mnt/eon0/boot/x86smb.eon and boot that one and retest.

The reason I say this, I've seen this pausing behavior with Sun's CIFS that I've not found an answer for. It could be occuring with your board also.

c1d0 66 MB/sec this is your max read HD speed
c0t0d0 19 MB/sec this is your max USB read speed

The read test avg between 20 - 28Mb/s

The write test peaked at 52Mb/s but seems at a point in your capture was doing read and write?

The simultaneous read write test was very weird. It seemed either writing or reading very few times simultaneously?
once here for 19Mb/s read and 15Mbs write (34Mb/s total) and total IOPS (153 + 123)
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
thing 10.0G 139G 153 123 19.0M 15.4M
c1d0 10.0G 139G 153 123 19.0M 15.4M
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

once here for 4Mb/s read and 34Mbs write total IOPS (277 + 31)
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
thing 10.0G 139G 31 277 3.96M 34.2M
c1d0 10.0G 139G 31 277 3.96M 34.2M
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

All write (peak) here at 43Mb/s and total IOPS 347
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
thing 10.0G 139G 0 347 0 42.9M
c1d0 10.0G 139G 0 347 0 42.9M
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

All read (peak) here at 30Mb/s and total IOPS 243
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
thing 10.0G 139G 243 0 30.3M 0
c1d0 10.0G 139G 243 0 30.3M 0
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

 

[00Roush]

I will give the SAMBA build a try.

All the tests were network copies.

You are correct... during my write only test the drive was also being read from. Not sure why the drive was being read from during this test but it explains the slow write speed. The read only test just seemed to be slower for some reason.

I will let you know how the SAMBA build works out.

00Roush

 

[eon]

Is compression enabled?

Is compression enabled? If yes is it the default zlib or gzip?

Since you are running 32-bit w ZFS, I'd recommend zlib or no compression. You may have to rebuild the pool or zpool set compression=lzjb poolname

Another thing to double check, make sure if you are using AHCI drives then the bios is set to AHCI also and not IDE/legacy. If its a IDE/legacy device, set the device respectively.

If you can, make sure the read write numbers are not bound by the system doing the transfers.

thanks 00Roush

 

[00Roush]

I got EON SAMBA 32 bit installed on my test machine. Setup a zpool with no compression as far as I know. Then setup zfs. Zfs -o casesensitivity=mixed thing/test From there I enabled Samba with svcadm enable samba. After that I slimmed down the smb.conf file to just this:

[global]
security = share
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=65536 SO_SNDBUF=65536
guest account = nobody

[test]
comment = test
path = /thing/test
public = yes
available = yes
browseable = yes
writable = yes
create mask = 0600
directory mask = 0700

Speeds are about 30-35 MB/sec and much more consistant. When I look at zpool iostat it is fairly consistent except for every couple of seconds the read or write speed drops. I believe this is due to the network card and the PCI bus. So now that I am feeling a bit more comfortable with EON I think I will give it a go on my server. Currently transfer speeds between my server and main computer are in the 80-100 MB/sec range. Hoping speeds will at least be around 80 MB/sec. I'll let you know.

00Roush

 

[eon]

Good to hear

future notes, you shouldn't have svcadm enable samba. It should already be running. Please let me know if did not start at boot for you.

Just a note. It seems that 32-bit and zfs has a slight condition. in some cases setting kernelbase to proper balance is needed. The trial part is finding the balance between user space and zfs memory and total ram available. The 64 bit version does not have this problem.
eeprom kernelbase = 0x??????

 

[00Roush]

Alright I got EON 64 Bit SAMBA setup on my main server. My two onboard Marvell network cards do not look like they are being detected so I had to use a PCI based Intel PRO/1000 MT which I think is holding back my performance. I also ended up having to change my bios to use IDE emulation for my SATA drives. When I had it set to use AHCI I was getting errors on the zpool and actually one drive was going offline in the middle of file transfers. With the different network card and the bios change things seem to be working just fine.

With a single disk zpool setup and using a smb.conf file similar to the one I posted above I am seeing ~60 MB/sec reads and ~77 MB/sec writes. (20.1 GB test file) After this testing I added a disk to the zpool (basically making it a RAID 0 array right?) and tried a few more large file copies. Transfer speeds did not seem to change so I believe the network card is a bottleneck. So it looks like I would need to get a driver for my Marvel Yukon 88E8053 PCIe network card if I want to go any further.

Since your thread was originally about comparing EON to FreeNAS do you you want to see some results with FreeNAS on the server? I can test with both the Intel PCI network card and the Marvell PCIe network card.

00Roush

 

[00Roush]

I forgot to ask... Do you ever have trouble using "zpool destory"? I cannot use it to get rid of the zpool I have been testing with. Every time I try it comes up with unrecognized command 'destroy' and then shows the usage information. I have been using format and then fdisk to delete the partitions. After a restart the zpool is gone.

00Roush

 

[eon]

zpool destroy pool

It sounds like you are missing and argument. To test a destroy on a pool with name test
you would type
zpool destroy test
or with the force switch (try to limit this use to only when necessary)
zpool destroy -f test

as a safe measure you should always try to unmount the pool to stop any possible I/O operations
zfs unmount -a
then zpool destroy test