[rescue] OS for ZFS?

Mon Mar 25 13:10:32 CDT 2013

As for the trust in Oracle, I wouldn't give them my money, but I think
they as a large company who many others give 100's of Millions to, I
think they're probably not going to put "bad code" in ZFS to delete
all your files or something. Now, I do want and like open source, and
thus, I'd rather use ZFS on FreeBSD or Linux, So this isn't a great
excuse on my part. But, I worry that the implementation in non-Solaris
may not be solid enough to really handle all failure cases such as
hotswap disks, checksum errors, controller issues / implementation /
drivers etc. I just want to see a more full implementation and failure
testing.

I have experienced problems and dataloss with ZFS on both Solaris and
FreeBSD. The Solaris instances were slightly more clear about what to
do next and failure cases.

Additionally, back a few years ago, the performance of Solaris SMB and
NFS on ZFS was much much better than and BSD based implementation. Not
just the filesystem -- the implementation, locking, and interaction
with ZFS. So, naturally, Solaris was a winner.

I hope that helps explain myself and why.. I'd love to be proved
wrong. :) And I'm willing to try stuff. (non production until it's
stable) :)

About NexentaStor, *Filer, *NAS: I found that some version require
management through the WEBGUI, which is OK, if it supports all
features. I got burned a few times when I wanted to do "normal" ZFS
operations just to get things working and became out of sync between
the Web DB and the OS itself.. then major pain happened. Napp-it seems
like it's good for this, since it is just a fancy shell wrapper.

Currently using Solaris 11 + napp-it.

Anyway my 2c.

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
> On 25 Mar 2013, at 13:19, "Joshua Snyder" <josh at imagestream.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I have been very happy with using Freebsd as a Zfs based file server for
>> the last few years at home.   I am also running an Open Indiana sever at
>> work serving up VM images via NFS.  Cory is correct, ram usage is a big
>> deal with Zfs you really want at least 1GB of ram and 4GB or more is
>> ideal.  You will likely not be able to use deduplication as it basically
>> requires large amounts of ram and a SSD as an L2Arc.
>>
>> Also, it is my understanding that you REALLY want to have a 64Bit cpu
>> architecture when doing Zfs.  This might be specific to Freebsd but as I
>> understand many of the file system operations are non-optimal if you
>> have to use a 32bit cpu.  I know in years past using Zfs in a 32bit
>> Freebsd install was basically asking for corruption.  So this might be a
>> problem depending on which version of the P4 you have in the Dell.
>>
>> I would stay away from any Linux ports of Zfs.  Since they are all based
>> on major rewrites(mostly clean-room re-implementations) of Sun's code
>> due to licensing issues.  I don't think they are as solid as FreeBsd,
>> Open Solaris, Open Indiana ect
>
> ZFS on Linux (kernel-mode, not a garbage user mode implementation) seems to
> have Nexenta and Sunacle copyrights in it at least in the user land utilities.
> It's also CDDL-licensed so it might not be a 100% cleanroom implementation.
> It's still a bit iffy though.  I could actually switch completely to a BSD
> again.  Huh.  No idea why i'm using a Linux aside from the tri-NIC bonding
> which I can probably do in BSD...
>
>>
>>                       Josh
>>
>>
>> On 3/25/2013 11:53 AM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>>> On 25 Mar 2013, at 12:50, "Scott Newell" <newell+rescue at n5tnl.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'm wanting to build a (headless) machine to play with ZFS.  It won't be
>>> doing much--light duty file server, some monitoring scripts, rsync backups
> of
>>> our VPS, etc.  Looking through the junk pile here at work, I see an Ultra
> 60
>>> (2 CPU, 1 or 2 GB ram, couple of drives) or an old Dell Precision
> workstation
>>> (2.8GHz P4, 512 MB, couple of old SATA drives).  Does either feel like a
>>> viable candidate?
>>>>
>>>> Any recommendations on an OS?  I've run OpenBSD and debian on them
> before,
>>> so I don't anticipate driver problems.
>>>
>>> RAM will be an issue if you want to do say, deduplication but otherwise
> you
>>> should be fine with the Ultra 60 for basic ZFS stuff I believe.  ZFS won't
>>> even let you enable it on 512M RAM in BSDs if I recall correctly.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> thanks!
>>>> newell  N5TNL
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>> _______________________________________________
>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

--
Zach Giles
zgiles at gmail.com