I have an Acer EasyStore with a RAID5 mdraid array I use for storing my home files (photos, movies, etc), and I want to migrate it to ZFS with Ubuntu (the native kernel module from zfsonlinux.org). I hear that ZFS needs a lot of RAM, but the EasyStore only has 2 GB. The RAIDZ will be three 1.5GB disks, and I’m wondering if ZFS won’t work with 2 GB of RAM. What problems, if any, [...]

I’m the proud new owner of an HP Proliant Microserver N40L, and planning to upgrade the paltry 2 GB of memory to the maximum of 16 GB. (Theoretically 8 GB is the limit, but empirically 16 GB has been shown to work.) Some guides advise that ECC memory is not that important, but I’m not so sure I believe this. I’ve installed FreeNAS and am planning to add ZFS volumes as soon as my new [...]

I have a 6TB RaidZ ZFS array configured on my nv129 based OpenSolaris filer, and I want to upgrade to FreeNAS as painlessly as possible. I remember betas had warnings that they did not support existing ZFS pools – has this changed? I can’t seem to find any official statement that this is possible, and I’d rather not risk my array if possible. I have backups, so I could start from scratch, I suppose, but [...]

BACKGROUND: We have a StarWind NAS that we are currently using for High Availability storage with our Windows network. Starwind has mirrored drives and multiple ip paths, that the Windows Server combines into one HA disk store. QUESTION: How do I accomplish the same thing under Solaris 10? I’ve looked at ZFS but to document seems to indicate that ZFS wants to do its own raid/mirroring. I can also attach via iSCSI from Solaris and [...]

I have a simple ZFS setup that I’ve been running for a few years now. When I originally set it up, I created a number of partitions and created a zpool from a partition on each of my two drives, and used the others for booting etc.. Now however I have a separate drive for booting and everything else, so I just want to use the entire drives for my zpool. I recently replaced a [...]

fault community. I need some advice on configuring ZFS. Here is what I have: Physical Disks: 4x 3 TB 2x 2 TB 2x 1 TB What is the best configuration for my Vdevs and storage pool. I want to maximaze space but still maintain redundancy. Should I just get 2 more 3TB’s and just create 2x 3-3TB raid2z storage pools? Create a 1x 4-3TB raidz2 vdev? Can I put redundancy at the pool level and [...]

I just got 6 new 2TB drives, and added them to my FreeNAS box. I have only dealt with RAID1 previously, and each setup has given what I was expecting. However, with the 6*2TB drives, I wanted to maximize the space available, so I went with raidz. But I seem to be missing space. I have 8.6TB available after the raidz was built. Maybe I did my math horribly wrong, but (N-1) x S(min) (where [...]

I’m still new to ZFS. I’ve been using Nexenta but I’m thinking of switching to OpenIndiana or Solaris 11 Express. Right now, I’m at a point of considering virtualizing the ZFS server as a guest within either ESXi, Hyper-V or XenServer (I haven’t decided which one yet – I’m leaning towards ESXi for VMDirectPath and FreeBSD support). The primary reason being that it seems like I have enough resources to go around that I could [...]

I’m using a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, with the ZFS PPA. I’m finding when I create a pool it will mount and function fine, but after a reboot it shows as UNAVAIL and I can’t find a way to get it back. Here is a log of a quick test to demonstrate: root@nas1:~# zpool status no pools available root@nas1:~# zpool create data /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-360019b90b24d9300174d28912b1c485d /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-360019b90b24d9300174d28a610419bec root@nas1:~# zpool status pool: data state: ONLINE scan: none [...]

I’m speccing out sandbox VM servers for developers at my company. The requirements for the dom0 hosts are: local, deduplicated ZFS storage (no separate storage servers), and Xen 4.1+ (4.2 is ideal). I checked out Oracle VM, but it only has Xen 4.0. I also looked at the Xen official list of supported dom0s, but none of the ZFS-supporting ones (openindiana/illumos and opensolaris) seem to be current enough to run Xen 4.1+. Question: What operating [...]