ZFS ZFS in flux, what to run if you want ZFS and not on Linux?

J

Joe

Hi,

Some background and then my question. I have run ZFS servers (home/SOHO) on Solaris SPARC and Intel for a long time, when it was still Sun. I didn't want to go to S11 for various reasons and S10 is past end of life. I have used all the Big 3 BSD over the years and like everyone have lots of interesting stories etc. I still have OpenBSD MIPS boxes and I have an OpenBSD Xeon server box for media. I have a Linux desktop but in general I'm not happy with it. I like ZFS a lot, especially on Solaris SPARC. What's important to me is the ease of management. I had a few drive failures (not on the SPARC boxes of course) and new drives resilver and stuff just works.

I am thinking about making some changes to my setup. The first thing is to decide if ZFS on BSD or a derivative (FreeNAS?) is stable. I did some research before joining here again. I was a member a long time ago. And I found ZFS is in flux again, ZOL, companies come and go, IllumOS explodes, etc.

1. Is ZFS on FreeBSD totally stable? My demands are not that great- just a root mirror and another tank mirror, 4 drives. I'm serving http(s), dlna, CIFS/Samba, ssh, rsync, and that's about it. I only have 8G of RAM in the box now but for OpenBSD it's plenty.
2. Is FreeBSD easy to upgrade and keep current? I don't mean -CURRENT, just would like to know if things have finally calmed down with system updates. I left FreeBSD when the transition from x-org (or to x-org?) was botched on a rolling change and haven't come back to it since then. Ports was always good.
3. Is ZFS on any FreeBSD derivative (FreeNAS? What else should I look at) in any better shape than ZFS on FreeBSD?
4. I don't need GUI management tools but I don't necessarily hate them. Is there any advantage to going to a NAS-oriented FreeBSD variant over running FreeBSD?

Thanks,

Joe
 
1. FreeBSD was one of the first to port ZFS and it's very stable. The only gripe I have with it is that I find you have got to limit ARC size manually to avoid it using all memory, causing the out of memory handler to start killing processes. Obviously there's a move to ZOL coming, but they will not replace the current module until the new port has had a lot of testing. It's already available as a port, but will likely be a year or two before there's talk of swapping over.

2. I've been running FreeBSD for years and know it quite well, but I generally stick with RELEASE and for my use see little reason not to. I don't have the time or patience to be messing with kernel/world builds. As such, upgrades are a simple case of freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.2 for example to upgrade to 11.2, then following the instructions. The average update takes about 10 minutes to download and sort itself out, then is a few quick commands and a reboot or two.

Of course with ZFS, you can make use of boot environments and make a new one before upgrading. If it doesn't go right or something isn't working well you can just boot back up in the original one.

3. I don't believe there is much difference in the code used by FreeNAS. However, being backed by iX Systems now who are heavy into server systems, and as such also heavy into ZFS, they do put a lot of resources into it and I wouldn't be surprised if they have patches applied that are not yet in base. (I have no idea if that's actually the case though).

4. I do believe FreeNAS has a lot of out of the box tuning, and as mentioned above, gets a lot of help by being developed by a company that sell mid-high end FreeBSD storage devices for a business. Personally I prefer FreeBSD but then I'm one of those people that likes knowing everything that's going on. I'm never comfortable when I'm just clicking buttons on the front of a black box and need to call in support or hope forums have the answer if anything doesn't work right or breaks.

I suspect FreeNAS makes a very good file server, especially for beginners, probably requiring a fair amount of expertise to match by configuring stock FreeBSD, although I've not really used it and wouldn't know how well it does other services like http/dlna.

I run many ZFS systems with less than 8GB RAM, but as mentioned I do find you need to limit ARC.

/boot/loader.conf
Code: 
vfs.zfs.arc_max="4G"
(I'd probably go for about 6-7GB on an 8GB server that is only running a few server processes otherwise)
 
Thanks a lot for the great info! It confirms most of what I read.

Does anybody know if FreeNAS pushes ZFS changes back to FreeBSD?

And does anybody know how compatible ZFS on FreeBSD is to what Solaris, Linux, etc. have?

One of the things that concerns me about running a backup box/file server on OpenBSD is that no other OS can read that filesystem. I have never had a problem, and I was thinking trying softraid, but it just does not let you see much of what's going on and I'm not clear if you can read individual drives that have been made into a softraid device. There is not much doc on it.
 
Does anybody know if FreeNAS pushes ZFS changes back to FreeBSD?
I think that's like asking if a transmission performance shop pushes design changes back to General Motors. FreeNAS is great, but it's a configuration of ZFS with a custom interface. It is not a modification of ZFS.

And does anybody know how compatible ZFS on FreeBSD is to what Solaris, Linux, etc. have?
Depends on what feature flags are enabled.

I migrated my ZFS boxes from Solaris to Linux in 2010 when KQ InfoTech ported it and was very happy. When FreeBSD incorporated it into the OS I migrated again. Based on what you stated, FreeBSD is what you want.
 
1) I've been using ZFS on FreeBSD since it became available (FreeBSD 8.x). Root-on-ZFS had to be installed by hand as the installer didn't have it yet. It's been running ever since. The only issues I've had with ZFS were mostly due to my own stupidity.

2) Stick to a -RELEASE version and you'll do fine. Easy to update, usually not a lot of patch releases. Minor upgrades X.1 -> X.2 for example are usually simple and painless. Major upgrades X.y -> X+1.y are sometimes more involving but for the most part also relatively painless.

3) they're exactly the same. ZFS is part of the base OS.

4) easy to use web interface, even somebody with little technical knowledge could maintain it.
 
Just a quick note to say that we've been running our University primary $HOME fileservers (about 10 Dell & HP boxes with around 1PB of used storage) using FreeBSD (currently at 11.2) for around 2 years now (started at FreeBSD 11.0). A few minor issues, but it's been working really well for the most time. ZFS using RAID-Z2 all the way.

*-RELEASE has been working out really well, except for a kernel-panic-causing bug in the RPCSEC_GSS kernel stuff which can be triggered if you have more than 128 concurrent NFS clients using sec=krb5 (so we currently run a custom kernel - it's a race condition that have a higher chance of happening the more active NFS&sec=krb5 clients you have). This looks to be fixed in 11.3 though so then we'll probably go back to using the normal RELEASE kernels again. This bug has nothing to do with ZFS though :)

(We've decided to not go to 12.0 for the primary servers so far, but will probably start looking at upgrading after 12.1 is released).
 
Thanks guys. I just brought up a 12-release box this evening. I realize 12.1 should be out any minute but my OpenBSD box died so it was time...

I notice the doc for packages (including the man pages) leaves a lot to be desired. The config for samba is nowhere to be found (resolved via web search) etc. Annoying! Copying a crap-ton of data and will attempt to configure some kind of httpd service, samba, and minidlna.
 
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