ZFS Very new to ZFS where to start

8bitGlitch

8bitGlitch

I am very new to ZFS, and I have been reading sites and resources; however, I am a little overwhelmed since I do not have the basics. Where is a good place to start to create a simple setup or what do you folks recommend to read, which I can use to scale my skills to more advanced topics. I sort of need a ZFS 101 Introduction.

I am reading about RAM requirements, and other items about zpools, but I am not sure what context these are in, and how they relate. I would like to start with a 2TB mirror (RAID1), but not sure what that is in zfs.

thank you
 
8bitGlitch said:
Where is a good place to start to create a simple setup
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Just follow the installer. It does everything automatically. Try doing a ZFS install a couple of times in a virtual machine, then you'll know what to expect without running the risk of breaking everything.

8bitGlitch said:
I am reading about RAM requirements,
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ZFS likes RAM, that's no secret. But unless you plan on using dedup or other advanced techniques you shouldn't worry too much about it. It will work fine even with low memory (2GB), it's not going to have stellar performance of course but it'll work without issues.

8bitGlitch said:
I would like to start with a 2TB mirror (RAID1), but not sure what that is in zfs.
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A mirror, just like you're used to.
 
Recently I moved from UFS to ZFS in my main personal computer. I reinstalled the FreeBSD. Everything went smoothly. I have no idea why I haven't done that long time ago! I merely read The Handbook. I think that's enough. There're few lectures about ZFS on the YouTube by Marshall Kirk McKusick. Also I think it's not a bad idea to search for "FreeBSD specific" common problems and possible solutions on the web and mailing lists:
site:lists.freebsd.org zfs
site:forums.freebsd.org zfs
site:wiki.freebsd.org zfs
 
Jose
Thank you for the link. I am looking at doing 4TB total with only 2Tb of storage. I do not have a large requirnment for items, and this is only for my home. Also I am excited to stick with FreeBSD since it has a BSD license, and trying to get away from GPL propaganda.
 
8bitGlitch said:
Jose
Thank you for the link. I am looking at doing 4TB total with only 2Tb of storage. I do not have a large requirnment for items, and this is only for my home. Also I am excited to stick with FreeBSD since it has a BSD license, and trying to get away from GPL propaganda.
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You're welcome! Easiest way to accomplish this is to create a mirror vdev with two 2TB hard drives. Mirror vdevs don't have the same constraints as RAID-Z vdevs. You can add disks to mirror vdevs. I struggled for years with LVM arrays on Linux. ZFS is so, so much better.

xtouqh said:
The following made me lose any interest in reading it in detail, sounds like "we have a solution, but I dislike it because it proves me wrong" to me:
Code: 
Use mirrors not RAID-Z(2/3)!
Doesn't make much sense to me for home NAS builders.
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That post is dated. I wound up going with a RAID-Z3 vdev with six drives in it. I like the illustration in the "Recap" section because I'm a graphically-driven person and the block diagram of how the different pieces of the ZFS architecture fit together was illuminating.

The hardest thing to get used to, but also probably the greatest strength of ZFS is that the file system (or dataset as it it often called) is completely independent from the zpool it happens to live on. Awful and difficult things like growing and shriking partitions or filesystems simply go away under this architecture.
 
Jose said:
That post is dated.
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Yeah, especially WRT the raidz expansion, but mirror vdevs were always there, and we are using striped pools of mirror vdevs (preferrably with disks in different enclosures, now that is really not for home NAS) as most performant for > 10 years; so why brush off a simple solution.
 
I do not have hardware yet, so I am going to try and use these links and what I have learned in Virtual Box. Do you think it can be done in Virtual box?
 
vigole
That is good to know. I have to be honest, I am immigrating from GPL kingdom, and not very familiar with BSD partitions and their flavors. I did some reading over last weekend and will be playing with Virtualbox to see if i can build a solution before buying the hardware.

+1
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8bitGlitch said:
I do not have hardware yet, so I am going to try and use these links and what I have learned in Virtual Box. Do you think it can be done in Virtual box?
Click to expand...
So long as performance if not a key issue, VirtualBox (or, frankly, and virtualisation server that supports FreeBSD) is a great way to get familiar with ZFS.

e.g. I switched the root of my ZFS server from a conventional mirror with a UFS file system to a ZFS mirror (the ZFS server was built prior to ZFS support for the root).

Testing the entire process on a virtual machine let me build a verified action plan with confidence and kept the down-time for the final cut-over to a minimum.
 
I suggest you get yourself (some running FreeBSD and) an USB stick. Create a partitioning with a bunch of slices or partitions. Then start playing with zpool create, modify, mirror, copy, destroy, and observe what happens, until you feel comfortable with the handling.
 
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