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Old 18th June 2008
tanked tanked is offline
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Default FreeBSD ZFS status and general information

Latest info can be found here: http://kerneltrap.org/FreeBSD/BSDCan_2008_ZFS_Internals

The most exciting news for me is that ZFS booting is implemented in the code in Pawel's personal repository.
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Old 18th June 2008
corey_james corey_james is offline
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zfs booting - that's cool!
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Old 18th June 2008
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*drool @ zfs booting*
I am building a NAS in a few months and I am hoping to use ZFS+RAID 5. Perhaps even doing it as a Xen VM inside of NetBSD or Linux.
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Old 19th June 2008
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@Weaseal, why not use Raid-Z as described in the above article?
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Old 19th June 2008
hamba hamba is offline
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oo nice
Now all I have to do is convince the boss that I need a new server.

What do you guys recommend for a samba server, 64bit or 32bit?
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Old 20th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stukov View Post
@Weaseal, why not use Raid-Z as described in the above article?
Hmm, good call. Actually, I hadn't yet read the article. I just now read that RAID-5 vs RAID-Z section. That's interesting, has anyone tested RAID-Z in the real-world yet?
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Old 20th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hamba View Post
oo nice
Now all I have to do is convince the boss that I need a new server.

What do you guys recommend for a samba server, 64bit or 32bit?
It looks like 64bit is recommended if you're using ZFS. From http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide

"An amd64 system is preferred due to its larger address space and better performance on 64bit variables, which ZFS uses a lot. It is not known how nicely ZFS plays with PAE in 7.0-RELEASE."
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Old 23rd June 2008
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Hmm... I have just recently run into a mess with having all of my data on ZFS partitions (FreeBSD 7.0) and a boot partition on UFS2.

I am, without a doubt, looking forward to a release with ZFSboot support.
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Old 25th June 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kienjakenobi View Post
Hmm... I have just recently run into a mess with having all of my data on ZFS partitions (FreeBSD 7.0) and a boot partition on UFS2.
Just curious, what kind of a mess? I'm doing that same sort of thing...
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Old 27th June 2008
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Well, I have a working ZFS set up, it is just that once it is set up, it is hard to change it.

For example:

I have two slices. If I can successfully virtualize Windows XP in FreeBSD, I want to delete my first slice, which contains a stand alone Windows XP that I will no longer need to dual boot into. Then I will want to expand the remaining slice and its filesystems to cover the entire hard disk. Well... This means I will have to move the UFS2 boot partition over to the left on the hard disk. Then move the swap partition to the left to touch the end of the boot partition. Then mess around with ZFS pools until I have another contiguous, large ZFS pool with everything important on it. This process would have been so much easier if I could just have a swap partition and one huge ZFS partition from which the system can boot.
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Old 30th June 2008
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We're using ZFS on a test backup server at the moment, doing rsync backups of multiple remote servers, and snapshotting the filesystem every night.

Hardware:
  • Tyan h2000M motherboard using ServerWorks 1000+nVidia chipsets
  • 2x dual-core Opteron 2200-series @ 2 GHz
  • 8 GB DDR2-667 ECC RAM (4 GB per CPU socket)
  • 3Ware 9650SX-16ML SATA RAID controller (PCIe) with 256 MB cache
  • 12x 500 GB SATA HD (16 MB cache each)
  • 5U rackmount case from Chenbro
  • 1300 watt 4x redundant power supply (can run on just 1)

OS:
  • 64-bit FreeBSD 7-STABLE from late May/early June

Drive setups:
  • 2x 500 GB HD in gmirror RAID1 for the OS
  • 8x 500 GB HD in raidz2 mounted as /pool
  • /pool/storage is the base directory for all zfs filesystems
  • /storage/remote-servers is the base directory for all backups
  • /storage/remote-servers/<servername> is the backup directory for each individual server that is backed up
  • every night, a snapshot is made of /storage/remote-servers
  • /storage is a standard ZFS filesystem
  • /storage/remote-servers is a gzip'd ZFS filesystem

For a month's worth of data, for 5 secondary school servers and 1 elementary school server, there's 412 GB of disk used. Each daily snapshot takes up just over 1 GB of space. (The servers we are backing up are NFS/terminal servers for the schools. All the computers in these schools are diskless workstations that boot off the network, and access all programs off the server, and store all data on the server.)

So far, we have been very impressed with both FreeBSD 7 and ZFS. We're really looking forward to FreeBSD 8 and the newer ZFS. The only issue we've had so far with the current v6 of ZFS is that you can't add devices to a raidz/raidz2 zpool. Once you create the pool, it's set in stone. You can replace drives with larger ones, but you can't add new devices. On the bright side, the server we're going to be running this on live, has 12x 400 GB HD and 12x 500 GB HD already in the case (and we're looking at getting a pair of 2 GB CompactFlash disks to use for the OS, so we'll have the full 10 TB to use for ZFS).

We've managed to lock up the test server 3 times since we started using ZFS. The first time, was due to not doing any kind of kernel/ZFS tuning (I wanted to see how long it would run). The second time was a few weeks later (recompiled the kernel and world, tuned the kernel via /boot/loader.conf). The third time was a week ago. After that, I did some more kernel tuning and ZFS tuning. Hasn't locked up since (knock wood).

If it locks up once or twice a month, it won't be a big deal. It's just the backup server, the backup scripts run from that server, so we'll notice and it won't be down long.

The current tuning settings we're using are:
/boot/loader.conf:
  • kern.hz="100" slow the CPU timers down a bit
  • kern.maxvnodes="500000" allow the system to have more open files (multiple parallel rsyncs can touch a lot of files in a short time)
  • vm.kmem_size="1610612736" give the kernel 1.5 GB of kmem (there's a current max of 1.9 but things get unstable above 1.5)
  • vm.kmem_size_max="16110612736" see above
  • vfs.zfs.arc_max="2147483648" give ZFS a max of 2 GB of RAM for filesystem cache
  • vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" disable ZFS prefetch as its known to cause issues

ZFS settings:
  • set recordsize for /pool to 64K (all the rest of the filesystems inherit that setting)
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