Dear all,

I know, this is only in parts an OpenIndiana related questions but maybe 
someone might share their experience / opinions...

I have a customer running OI157_a8 on a Dell DL380-G7. Works like a charm and 
everyone's happy. There's only one downside to the configuration and that's the 
SmarArray P410i RAID controller. Crappy to use with ZFS as it can't be run in 
JBOD mode. We had to configure it with 8 RAID0 logical volumes which makes disk 
replacement a nightmare. Anyway, it's not a certified Oracle configuration so 
you sometimes have to make compromises...

Now a few weeks ago we received an Oracle T3-1 SPARC server in similar 
configuration: 8 port SAS backplane, MegaRaid 9261-8i, fully equipped with 8 
disks. To my dismay I had to realize that as with the DL380 you *cannot* switch 
of the LSI's RAID feature and while HP's SmartArray acucli is clumsy, LSI's 
MegaCLI is just a joke.

Our Oracle tech rep gave advice to configure the 8 disks in single drive RAID0 
and run them in RAIDZ but it seems that this is lose-lose: ZFS does not live up 
to its potential in volume and fault management (e.g. not being able to 
reliably switch to spares) and you still have to use MegaCLI to handle failed 
drives. On the other hand, using a pure LSI RAID setup, I lose all ZFS beauty. 
We were finally told that going for other controllers was no option with SUN 
SGX-SAS6-INT-Z not being certified for the T3-1.

Question now: what would you recommend? 8 LSI RAID0 LVs under ZFS, 8 drives 
under LSI RAID-5, or switch to an Oracle certified controller with JBOD mode 
(which one??)? Does it make sense to go for Soft RAID anyway, with that 
configuration?

Cheers
 Stefan

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