ZFS on CentOS 7 : Preface and HW info

Preface

These are the notes on my adventure into getting a ZFS server running on centos 7; with the objective of creating a software-defined-storage solution without the hardware compatibility limitations of vendor offerings.

I am using a mixture of enterprise and consumer grade hardware to start, basically the spare stuff I have around the office.

Hardware info

• Server
• Dell Poweredge R610
• 24GB Ram
• 4x Gbs ethernet
• HDD
•  x2 10k SAS 300GB HDD
• Raid-1 handled by Poweredge controller
• These are for the OS,  ZFS will not touch these
• SDD
• x2 Sandisk SATA 32GB
• Passed through Poweredge controller to be handled by ZFS
• These will be used for various caches as I test different tuning options
• SAS HBA connected to MD3200
•  JBOD-ish Device
• DELL MD3200
• 10x 7.2K SAS 1.2TB HDD
• Technically this is not, and cannot be, a JBOD. But I've set each drive in it's own disk group, so it presents itself more-or-less like a JBOD.
• Other Hardware
• 4 Additional R610 servers, running XenServer to use as clients to test virtualization performance.
• Dell Force10 10GB switch. This is in use for other things, but should provide sufficient bandwidth since my hosts are limited to 1GB by their hardware 

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