Re: [gentoo-user] ZFS

[Pandu Poluan]

On Sep 21, 2013 7:54 PM, "thegeezer" <thegeezer@×××××××××.net> wrote:
>
> On 09/17/2013 08:20 AM, Grant wrote:
> > I'm convinced I need 3-disk RAID1 so I can lose 2 drives and keep
> > running.  I'd also like to stripe for performance, resulting in
> > RAID10.  It sounds like most hardware controllers do not support
> > 6-disk RAID10 so ZFS looks very interesting.
> >
> > Can I operate ZFS RAID without a hardware RAID controller?
> >
> > From a RAID perspective only, is ZFS a better choice than conventional
> > software RAID?
> >
> > ZFS seems to have many excellent features and I'd like to ease into
> > them slowly (like an old man into a nice warm bath).  Does ZFS allow
> > you to set up additional features later (e.g. snapshots, encryption,
> > deduplication, compression) or is some forethought required when first
> > making the filesystem?
> >
> > It looks like there are comprehensive ZFS Gentoo docs
> > (http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ZFS) but can anyone tell me from the real
> > world about how much extra difficulty/complexity is added to
> > installation and ongoing administration when choosing ZFS over ext4?
> >
> > Performance doesn't seem to be one of ZFS's strong points.  Is it
> > considered suitable for a high-performance server?
> >
> > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM1NTA
> >
> > Besides performance, are there any drawbacks to ZFS compared to ext4?
> >
> > - Grant
> >
> Howdy,
> been reading this thread and am pretty intrigued, ZFS is much more than
> i thought it was.
> I was wondering though does ZFS work as a multiple client single storage
> cluster such as GFS/OCFS/VMFS/OrangeFS ?

Well... not really.

Of course you could run ZFS over DRBD, or run any of those filesystems on
top a zvol...

But I'll say, ZFS is not (yet?) a clustered filesystem.

> I was also wondering if anyone could share their experience with ZFS on
> iscsi - especially considering the readahead /proc changes required on
> same system ?
> thanks!
>

Although I have no experience of ZFS over iSCSI, I don't think that's any
problem.

As long as ZFS can 'see' the block device comes time for it to mount the
pool and all 'child' datasets (or zvols), all should be well.

In this case, however, you would want the iSCSI target to not perform a
readahead. Let ZFS 'instructs' the iSCSI target on which sectors to read.

Rgds,
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