• host refreshed with OpenIndiana 151

    by  • 8th August 2011 • post

    Since the opensolaris.org vanished I was left wondering, what I’m going to use for my storage/vm server next. Fortunately Open Indiana raised from the OS ashes and world was bright again for my server.

    Initially I went to Open Indiana Installing and Upgrading site and followed the Upgrade from OpenSolaris path. The system installed nicely in a new Boot Environment. I was happy. Removed the XEN hypervisor as it no longer was good enough for my requirements and went with VirtualBox for the Virtual Host function.

    However, after a few movies watched I’ve started noticing that there is something wrong. Suddenly my servers NFS throughput was so low that none of the movies played. May I mention that this is 1Gig network ? Which worked perfectly well prior to the upgrade. I was devastated.  Started using SSHFS as a temporary fix. Strange, transferring files and file operations were quicker over encrypted connection than pure NFS3 or NFS4 …

    I’ve tried many things, experimenting with different NFS mount options,  uninstalling VirtualBox and countless debugging and … nothing helped.

    Then I’ve tried upgrading to oi_151, still a pre-realease version. Didn’t work, actually made it even worse, as SSHFS lost it’s performance as well.

    It was time for a drastic measure.

    I’ve pulled two unused 320GB WD drives from dell and installed them in host, replacing rpool drives and left tank pool drives unplugged.

    Again went to  Open Indiana Installing and Upgrading and this time created USB stick with the server installer media.

    Boot, a few F2 presses and basic details like hostname, users and passwords later, I have a clean slate OpenIndia oi_148. Great stuff!

    Shut down, re-plug the tank pool, startup… oh it’s not showing, zpool import tank .. oh yeah, forgot to export it from last OS, zpool import -f tank makes all the difference.
    I like how it preserved all NFS shares. Quick mount on dell to verify it works at full speed, oh yeah it does!

    Now as we are here, why not upgrade to oi_151 .

    pfexec pkg set-publisher --non-sticky openindiana.org
    pfexec pkg set-publisher -P -O http://pkg.openindiana.org/dev-il/ openindiana.org
    pfexec pkg install SUNWipkg
    pfexec pkg image-update -v --be-name openindiana_151

    Reboot and it’s oi_151, sweet.

    Reinstalled VirtualBox, recreated vm’s as i’ve forgot I have them on old rpool ( however vdi’s were on tank ) and now my server is a happy bunny, working like a charm!