how to create zfs

[anikhtos]

how anyone can create zfs??
i come across to the zfs recently and i see it is a good option to store data
so how i make it??
what do i need
from hardware angle
and what from software angle??
thank you

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

You need to pay Sun one meelion dollars.

 

[ethebubbeth]

Supported Operating systems (from the Wikipedia page for ZFS):
Solaris, OpenSolaris , Illumos, OpenIndiana , FreeBSD, Mac OS X Server 10.5, NetBSD, Linux via ZFS-FUSE or partial native support via 3rd party kernel module

The best support for ZFS is in Solaris Unix and its derivatives (OpenSolaris, Illumos, OpenIndiana) because it was created by Sun Microsystems and that is their Unix distribution.

The support in FreeBSD is a little behind but catching up quickly (I use ZFS in FreeNAS, which is based upon BSD). It is almost as good as in Solaris.

Linux runs into issues because the CDDL license used by sun is mutually exclusive with the GPL license under which the linux kernel is distributed. Therefore, ZFS has only been implemented in userspace as a FUSE plugin, which has many disadvantages. There is currently an effort to implement it in the kernel, but it requires a complete rewrite from the ground up and could still be subject to patent attacks.

In terms of hardware, you just need hardware fully supported by the above operating systems. ZFS works best when given direct access to the hardware. Ideally, you would just be using the SATA connectors on your motherboard in AHCI without RAID. If you are using an external RAID enclosure, make sure to set it to JBOD to make it closer to the previously mentioned scenario.

 

[anikhtos]

which one has the best compatibility list??
is FreeBsb a nice choice??
which will be the easier to create and hanlde if you have never before.
needed only for the added security of zfs

 

[penguinsamurai]

The ZFS linux kernel module is maturing rapidly. Here is how to get your Ubuntu system booting from ZFS: https://github.com/dajhorn/pkg-zfs/wiki/HOWTO-install-Ubuntu-to-a-Native-ZFS-Root-Filesystem.

Secondly, the OpenIndiana team just produced an updated release.

OpenIndiana is an opensolaris (technically a Illumos) distribution in the same way that Ubuntu or Redhat is a Linux distribution. Each Distribution creates an Installer program, a bunch of applications and utilities, and an operating system kernel, bundles it and "distributes it" as a usable work environment.

The OpenIndiana release includes a Live-USB and Live-DVD image, as well as a Hardware compatibility test program. I highly recommend openIndiana - have a look at:

http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Installing+OpenIndiana
​

You can also give Nexenta or one of its derivatives a try.

All of these run well enough in VirtualBox too.

Know this though: ZFS loves two things:
1. RAM, ram, and more ram. Even more so if you want to enable deduplication. (http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2011/07/zfs-dedupe-or-not-dedupe)
2. Lots of physical disk spindles.

I've seen many benchmarks and tests where other systems outperform ZFS because ZFS is not given the hardware to come into its own right. It is analogous to saying busybox Linux is better than Ubuntu because you tested it on a very-low-spec-system and busybox beat ubuntu in the benchmarks.

I wish I had the skill, resources and time to run those benchmark tests, but I would pit xfs, jfs, ext3, et al against zfs on a system with say 8 hard drives and 16 GB ram. [redacted]

With less than 1 GB ram, ZFS is a dog. With 2 GB it becomes usable, but still noticeably slow. With 4 GB it is quite good.

In any case, at least play with it in virtualbox!


Hi,

Welcome to the forums.

I had to remove your link to your own blog post, as the forum guidelines prohibit such actions as "self-promotion". We get a lot of spam on this site, so we enforce guidelines such as this one to help curb it and avoid turning the forums into one giant sales floor for everybody.

Thanks for the helpful post, and may I once again welcome you to the forums :thumbsup:

Moderator jvroig

 

[Virucyde]

Hi, I know it may sound like a good idea, but my work kept all of their data in the ZFS, and even with a RAID6, our servers went down, and now we're finding it horribly difficult to recover any data. We even have Oracle themselves down here trying to help recover the data.

Basically, it has some great features yes, but I'd definitely ensure you have some good offline backups, rather than relying on mirroring, since even with perfectly good files, data recovery in ZFS is very badly supported.

 

[sub.mesa]

ZFS on FreeBSD is not really behind; it has all released CDDL code and has some unique features such as booting from RAID-Z and better handling of 4K sector disks (ashift=12).

If you want an easy start with ZFS I recommend FreeNAS or ZFSguru. You can try both in a Virtualbox VM to try them out. Both use a web-interface to configure and setup your server.

@Virucyde: what happened that you needed to perform recovery in the first place? ZFS fixes all damage it can, if you needed recovery you did something wrong in the first place. Did multiple disks in a mirror fail? If so your backup should have compensated for that, or you should have chosen RAID-Z2 or even RAID-Z3 with more redundancy. Did you perhaps use Hardware RAID6 in combination with ZFS? Because that is a very bad combination you should never use; ZFS wants direct control over the disks not some dangerous RAID layer in between; that negates many of ZFS' safety features.

One big plus of ZFS is that you never have to perform a filesystem check; it fixes all damage it can automatically. You just need to make sure enough redundancy is available to let ZFS do what it's good at.

 

[wantmore]

If all you want is to set up a ZFS server and don't have any preferences for the OS part, I'd reccommend installing either OpenIndiana, NexentaCore or Solaris Express as there's a very nice 3'd party web-ui available that will ease the setup and daily administration of your server considerably. The author who goes by the nick _Gea around the web where ZFS tend to be discussed also seem to spend a lot of time providing support and advice on several forum. Probably even here (forgot to check)

The web-ui is called Nappp-It, and can be found here: http://www.napp-it.org/index_en.html and you should also find some nice tutorials and advice on both software and hardware to get you started.

One of the threads I check from time to time is "OpenSolaris derived ZFS NAS/ SAN" over at http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1573272 where several generous and knowledgeable people provide first rate support.

The old OpenSolaris lists should also be worth checking unless Larry killed it. I'll come back with links to some good documentation once i cave in and reboot my regular system (trying to see if i could live with the horrid horrid thing Apple shipped as "Lion". It doesn't look good).

 

[taltamir]

@OP: Just get SolarisExpress 11.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/s...11/downloads/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen
It just works... most restrictive license but it works. Just grab an x86 CPU of any kind (intel or AMD) and any GPU but AMD (Intel or nVidia)
Then configure it to share via:
http://wiki.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Getting_Started_With_the_Solaris_CIFS_Service

It has the most restrictive license by copyright trolls (oracle) who bought the original maker (sun)... But none of that is relevant to a home user just trying to get a system that works.
It also has the most complete, most easy to use, and most "just works" system out there.
There aren't going to be any updates because oracle decided to only develop its future OS for their own CPU architecture (which they got from sun as well) called SPARC rather then "supporting intel and MS by developing x86". But even without any update in sight it will be a few years before other OS are on par with Solaris Express 11. At which point you can just migrate to one of them.

OpenSolaris: A development version for SolarisExpress with 6 month release cycles. Was discontinued (last version v134) and a year later SolarisExpress 11 came (v155 IIRC) with a bunch of updates. No point using it over solaris Express 11 since it is just an older version of same code.

Illumos: Fork of latest OpenSolaris (v134) with the intentional of making it fully open source. Its future prospects are hobbled by insistance on bit compatibility with Solaris / SolarisExpress and currently it is not up to SolarisExpress 11 level quite yet since there is a lot of code they have to replace. Its own corporate sponsors don't use it yet.

Nexenta: Based on OpenSolaris v134, so its quite a bit outdated compared to SolarisExpress 11. Nexenta is a major founder and supporter of Illumos but they aren't using it yet. Also comes with limits on use. It uses Solaris kernal married to GNU userland. Has a nice GUI so you might like it.

FreeBSD: Not worth it, see below.

FreeNAS: A NAS based on FreeBSD. This takes FreeBSD, strips away all capabilities not related to running a fileserver, and slaps on some nice specialized GUI. It used to have no ZFS support but recently added it. I am actually going to try it myself and might be switching from SolarisExpress 11 to it if it is as good as it looks like.

I tried FreeBSD but it failed to run after install. I should note the installer is pure command line (FAIL 1), requires to manually confiure stuff like networking which should be fully automatic (major FAIL 2), and has a total fail of an fdisk that can't even tell you disk/partition sizes, it lists a size but I think that it is in sectors or something since it is all wrong. Oh and it wouldn't tell you which partition belongs to which physical drive. (EPIC FAIL 3 and 4)

Hi, I know it may sound like a good idea, but my work kept all of their data in the ZFS, and even with a RAID6, our servers went down, and now we're finding it horribly difficult to recover any data. We even have Oracle themselves down here trying to help recover the data.

Basically, it has some great features yes, but I'd definitely ensure you have some good offline backups, rather than relying on mirroring, since even with perfectly good files, data recovery in ZFS is very badly supported.

No! data recovery in ZFS is seamless. Your problem is that you are trying to recover data that isn't there. Multiple concurrent drive failures is a very dangerous and real risk in RAID arrays and means total loss of data, this is true for ANY FS out there. There is nothing you could have done with NTFS or FAT or any other OS in the world in such a situation either. Blaming ZFS for that is beyond absurd.

Yes! you should ABSOUTELY have backups. What kind of stupid ass corporation doesn't keep backups?

 

[Emulex]

no kidding - veeam - cheap and does both backup and replication (ie offsite) - a small business can spend $1500 (one time, plus small yearly support fee) to have disk2disk backups of everything (virtualized) and replicated over comcast business to your house or a datacenter.

I was curious - the lefthand VSA its stupid easy to cluster - the esxi5 vsa - stupid easy (Vcenter) to cluster and setup expand.

is there any UI ? This stuff is all easy - building the storage, expanding the volumes, snapshotting, thick/thin provisioning - one web page can cover it all in a way that anyone can deploy san/nas/both - even setting up a quorum for clustered storage so ou have network raid is easy peasey now.

Where does opensolaris lie compared to say esx5i VSA for small business? (essentially exports the DAS storage on your vmhost host to itself and 2 other vmware hosts - 1,2, or 3 hosts can cluster their storage for extra redundancy (at a cost) - but clustered storage for a 2-pc small business - plus some off-site replication - that's pretty powerful technology so no small business needs to face catastrophic failure downtime.

You need to have enough backups so when someone pwns you for 6 months you can roll back and find a good safe point. so when all your AD servers catch on fire (?!?) you can pop them back without having to muck around with restore more.

SRM was for big enterprise but now small business can afford SRM, and a full DR setup that could be tested every day - in a sandbox - even if that's an old crappy server with 6 RE4 2TB drives replicating once a day over comcast business WAN to your basement.

no excuses any more!