ZFS is a modern fileystem originally developed by Sun Microsystems and licensed under the CDDL.
31
votes
1answer
1k views
I am going to chop the FreeBSD automounter into little pieces and boil them in oil
I am trying to expose a hierarchy of home directories to a number of FreeBSD jails. The home directories are configured such that each is a unique ZFS dataset. The jails are used for development ...
27
votes
11answers
14k views
ZFS vs XFS
We're considering building a ~16TB storage server. At the moment, we're considering both ZFS and XFS as filesystem. What are the advantages, disadvantages? What do we have to look for? Is there a ...
20
votes
4answers
2k views
ZFS on FreeBSD: recovery from data corruption
I have several TBs of very valuable personal data in a zpool which I can not access due to data corruption. The pool was originally set up back in 2009 or so on a FreeBSD 7.2 system running inside a ...
19
votes
4answers
2k views
LVM snapshots vs. file system snapshots
As far as I know, LVM makes it possible to take snapshots of a volume. There are also a number of file systems (ZFS, Btrfs, reiserfs, ...) which supports snapshots.
However, I've never understood the ...
15
votes
6answers
11k views
How does BTRFS compare to ZFS?
I am considering which OS and filesystem to use on some new servers I have and am considering either Free BSD with ZFS, or Linux with BTRFS.
The programs I have run on both systems, so the only ...
14
votes
2answers
1k views
ZFS Data Loss Scenarios
I'm looking toward building a largish ZFS Pool (150TB+), and I'd like to hear people experiences about data loss scenarios due to failed hardware, in particular, distinguishing between instances where ...
13
votes
4answers
4k views
ZFS and SAN — best practices?
Most discussions of ZFS suggest that the hardware RAID be turned off and that ZFS should directly talk to the disks and manage the RAID on the host (instead of the RAID controller).
This makes sense ...
13
votes
5answers
2k views
recommendations for efficient offsite remote backup solution of vm's
I am looking for recommendations for backing up my current 6 vm's(and soon to grow to up to 20). Currently I am running a two node proxmox cluster(which is a debian base using kvm for virtualization ...
12
votes
3answers
2k views
150 TB and growing, but how to grow?
My group currently has two largish storage servers, both NAS running debian linux. The first is an all-in-one 24-disk (SATA) server that is several years old. We have two hardware RAIDS set up on it ...
12
votes
1answer
286 views
Technical details for Server 2012 de-duplication feature
Now that Windows Server 2012 comes with de-duplication features for NTFS volumes I am having a hard time finding technical details about it. I can deduce from the TechNet documentation that the ...
11
votes
7answers
5k views
ZFS alternative for Linux?
I'm running OpenSolaris with ZFS for my main fileserver. I originally went with ZFS because I heard so many awesome things about it:
Automatic disk spanning (zpools)
Software RAID (RAID-Z)
Automatic ...
10
votes
1answer
3k views
For L2ARC and ZIL: is it better to have one large SSD for both, or two smaller SSDs?
Main references
ZFS L2ARC (Brendan Gregg) (2008-07-22) and ZFS and the Hybrid Storage Concept (Anatol Studler's Blog) (2008-11-11) include the following diagram:
Question
Should I interpret the ...
10
votes
9answers
4k views
Best compression for ZFS send/recv
I'm sending incremental ZFS snapshots over a point-to-point T1 line and we're to a point where a day's worth of snapshots can barely make it over the wire before the next backup starts. Our send/recv ...
10
votes
2answers
282 views
Why are all of my ZFS snapshot directories empty?
I'm running an Oracle 11 box as a ZFS storage appliance, and I'm taking regular snapshots of the ZFS filesystems, via cron.
In the past, I know that if I wanted to grab a particular file from a ...
9
votes
1answer
3k views
Hosting a ZFS server as a virtual guest
I'm still new to ZFS. I've been using Nexenta but I'm thinking of switching to OpenIndiana or Solaris 11 Express. Right now, I'm at a point of considering virtualizing the ZFS server as a guest within ...
9
votes
2answers
14k views
How can I add one disk to an existing raidz zpool?
I have an OpenSolaris server with a zpool backupz comprised of four SCSI drives:
-bash-3.2# zpool status backupz
pool: backupz
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME ...
9
votes
2answers
5k views
How to upgrade a ZFS RAID-Z array to larger disks on OpenSolaris?
I'm planning on installing OpenSolaris on my home server (right now it has Linux) and I would like to know how to prepare for upgrading the server to have larger hard drives in the future. Now the ...
9
votes
2answers
2k views
ZFS and cache devices
I'm going to add a SSD drives to my ZFS storages as a cache. Anyone has any experience with this? What if cache device dies, will the any data be affected?
9
votes
3answers
3k views
ZFS - Impact of L2ARC cache device failure (Nexenta)
I have an HP ProLiant DL380 G7 server running as a NexentaStor storage unit.
The server has 36GB RAM, 2 LSI 9211-8i SAS controllers (no SAS expanders), 2 SAS system drives, 12 SAS data drives, a ...
9
votes
2answers
2k views
Since upgrading to Solaris 11, my ARC size has consistently targeted 119MB, despite having 30GB RAM. What? Why?
I ran a NAS/SAN box on Solaris 11 Express before Solaris 11 was released. The box is an HP X1600 with an attached D2700. In all, 12x 1TB 7200 SATA disks, 12x 300GB 10k SAS disks in separate zpools. ...
9
votes
8answers
3k views
Anybody have experience with using Nexenta? [closed]
I'm evaluating the Nexenta platform to hopefully one day replace our legacy file servers. I would primarily use it as a CIFS server in an Active Directory environment.
Anyone out there have any ...
8
votes
3answers
928 views
Backup storage server with ZFS
I am IT everything man at a small company. I want to design a new infrastructure including a new server and a separate backup server with company wide backup policy.
The most important thing in the ...
8
votes
7answers
1k views
Is there a case against ZFS?
Is there still a case against using ZFS in production?
I run Solaris servers and I am planning an upgrade to Solaris 10 10/09 from an earlier release.
Currently we use SVM for local disks and our ...
8
votes
5answers
2k views
Which is faster for read access on EC2; local drive or EBS?
Which is faster for read access on an EC2 instance; the "local" drive or an attached EBS volume?
I have some data that needs to be persisted so have placed this on an EBS volume. I'm using ...
8
votes
2answers
622 views
ZFS: How do you restore the correct number of copies after losing a drive?
With zfs, if you have copies=2 and then you lose a drive containing some of those copies, how do you tell the system that it should make a new copy of the data blocks for the affected files? Or does ...
8
votes
5answers
4k views
Best filesystem choices for NFS storing VMware disk images
Currently we use an iSCSI SAN as storage for several VMware ESXi servers. I am investigating the use of an NFS target on a Linux server for additional virtual machines. I am also open to the idea of ...
8
votes
6answers
3k views
Cannot destroy ZFS snapshot: dataset already exists
I have a server (T5220, though I doubt it matters) running Solaris 10 8/07 and I have a ZFS pool, "mysql", on internal disk. Within it I have a filesystem "mysql/data/4.1.12", which I snapshot hourly ...
8
votes
2answers
506 views
zfs and future expandability
I want to build a server using freebsd 9 and zfs. I have some old hardware (intel quad core with 8 gb ram) lying around, and I am willing to purchase two or three 1 TB disks. I also have a dlink RAID ...
8
votes
2answers
916 views
Is it safe to replicate from Solaris ZFS to FreeBSD ZFS?
Is it safe to replicate from a Solaris 10 ZFS v22 to a FreeBSD 8.3 ZFS v28?
Are there someone that have done this with specific versions of ZFS, where it worked perfectly?
8
votes
7answers
7k views
Tuning NFS client/server stack
I have a CentOS 5 VMWare server connecting to an OpenSolaris 2009.06 machine over NFS that holds the disk images. My virtual machines seem to be bound by slow IO so I'd like to do everything I can to ...
7
votes
6answers
3k views
hardware recommendations for a DIY storage system based on ZFS [closed]
Looking to make use of old server lying idle as a proof-of-concept
...here are specs
Dell PE 2900: Xeon 5110 - 2P, 12 GB RAM, 8x 300 GB 15K drives, Perc 5i+256 MB cache
what additional h/w would be ...
7
votes
6answers
4k views
Is bit rot on hard drives a real problem? What can be done about it?
A friend is talking with me about the problem of bit rot - bits on drives randomly flipping, corrupting data. Incredibly rare, but with enough time it could be a problem, and it's impossible to ...
7
votes
4answers
1k views
ZFS and non Sun OS's
Is there any other Unix like distros that can read and write to ZFS filesystems. I know its currently unstable in FreeBSD :( The reason I am asking is I love ZFS but don't get on so well with Solaris.
...
7
votes
4answers
6k views
ZFS Sync over unreliable, slow WAN. ZFS replication, or rsync?
I've been tasked with making an off-site backup work over the WAN. Both storage boxes are FreeBSD based NAS boxes running ZFS.
Once or twice a week, 15-60 gigs of photography data gets dumped to the ...
7
votes
3answers
379 views
How ZFS handles online replacement in a RAID-Z (theoretical)
This is a somewhat theoretical question about ZFS and RAID-Z. I'll use a three disk single-parity array as an example for clarity, but the problem can be extended to any number of disks and any ...
7
votes
1answer
224 views
Why did my zpool replace never finish and what should I do now?
I have a ZFS zpool with two disks in a mirror configuration, da0 and da1. da1 failed, and so I replaced it with da2 using
zpool replace BearCow da1 da2
This ran for a few hours, during which zpool ...
7
votes
3answers
3k views
Is FreeNAS ready for the enterprise?
I am having a bit of split in thought.
I am looking at getting a NAS for my company, we need it for our VMware server.
Originally the idea was to buy a NAS (a Netgear ReadyNAS)
But then I got some ...
7
votes
3answers
664 views
growing a raid z(1/2)
I'm planning on building a fileserver on top of opensolaris, using either a raid z1 or z2. Is it possible to later upgrade a disk at a time and immediately have access to the increased storage? Or ...
7
votes
1answer
348 views
ZFS replication between 2 ZFS file systems
I initially replicated tank/storage1 --> usb1/storage1-slave (depicted below), and then (deliberately) destroyed the snapshot I replicated from. By doing this, did I lose the ability to incrementally ...
7
votes
1answer
279 views
How do you create large, growable, shared filesystems on Linux at AWS?
What are acceptable/reasonable/best ways to provide large, growable, shared storage at AWS, exposed as a single filesystem?
We're currently making 1TB EBS volumes ~biweekly and NFS exporting with ...
7
votes
3answers
732 views
“zpool replace” hangs and locks up the pool
Given my four disk RAIDZ1, one disk has become physically noisy, not producing errors yet, but not sounding healthy either. So I've chosen to pre-emptively replace it.
I have done:
zpool offline ...
6
votes
7answers
10k views
ZFS on Ubuntu Server?
My filer currently has two basic md-type software raid 5 sets. One 8 x 500 GB and one 4 x 1TB. To make the configuration a little more flexible I'm considering adding LVM. Before I do, I figured I ...
6
votes
3answers
2k views
Where can I find introductory documentation for ZFS?
I recently installed OpenIndiana because of an interest in ZFS. I like the feature-list of ZFS, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how to configure it. All of the documentation I ...
6
votes
5answers
921 views
File size with zfs compression
I usually estimate the size of a whole directory tree using du -ks $DIRECTOY_TREE_ROOT, but this method cannot be used when zfs compression is on.
The total displayed by ls -l is ok for a single ...
6
votes
3answers
2k views
FreeBSD ZFS RAID-Z2 performance issues
I'm trying to build my own network attached storage based on FreeBSD+ZFS+standard components, but there are strange performance issues.
The hardware specs are:
AMD Athlon II X2 240e processor
ASUS ...
6
votes
6answers
2k views
How stable is zfs-fuse 0.6.9 on Linux?
I'm thinking of using ZFS for my home-made NAS array. I would have 4 HDDs in raidz on a Ubuntu Server 10.04 machine.
I'd like to use the snapshot capability and dedup when storing data. I'm not so ...
6
votes
1answer
489 views
zfs pool not automatically mounted
I recently installed freebsd 8 on a file server and created a raidz-pool from 4 drives. It works fine, except the filesystems are not mounted automatically on boot. zpool status and zfs list shows ...
6
votes
1answer
128 views
Identifying the number of changed bytes between two ZFS snapshots of the same file
Let's assume I have a ZFS filesystem that contains virtual machine disk images, e.g.
/tank/examplevm/examplevm-flat.vmdk
Let's further assume I take daily snapshots of that ZFS filesystem, e.g.
$ ...
6
votes
2answers
235 views
Why did I experience checksum errors with a ZFS filesystem on an ESXi RDM?
I have a VMware ESXi 4.1 server which I recently added 2x1TB SATA drives to. This machine runs a NexentaStor Community VM which hosts ZFS filesystems. Before adding the new drives, all the ZFS zpools ...
6
votes
2answers
926 views
Getting ZFS per dataset IO statistics (or NFS per export IO statistics)
Where do I find statistics about how IO is divided between zfs datasets? (zpool iostat only tells me how much IO a pool is experiencing.)
All the relevant datasets are used through NFS, so I'd be ...
