ZFSguru NAS fileserver project

No1451 said:
Well if I'm reading him right he seems to want Windows to be the bottom level and FreeBSD running on top of that. No idea why. But yeah, if FreeBSD is on the bottom with windows virtualized....good luck gaming. Modern games will just crap themselves.
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He did originally ask about BSD on Windows.
But in the line you quoted it was a later post where he was asking about Windows on BSD. An idea I originally suggested (IIRC, maybe I just thought it... I don't remember anymore and its too much of a chore to reread it all), but I wasn't aware he wanted it for lan party gaming at the time.
If he needs to occasionally run a windows program he likes to do something like reencode a video with a GUI (and he doesn't like the FOSS alternatives) then I would think that windows on BSD would be the way to go. Since there is no risk of windows breaking his ZFS that way. But considering his unique requirements I would say just stick to windows by itself and forget ZFS.
 
Yes, I was asking about Widnows VM's in BSD now last, and I was wondering if its possible to get one of the CPU's to be dedicated to the windows vm.
 
Ahh, this is what I get for being 30 hours awake, haha. Do you intend to game? Are you comfortable enough with FreeBSD(or OpenIndiana, Solaris, etc) that you could use them day to day? And do you really really NEED your storage to be that fast? Looking at the configuration you wanted to run, it seems you want performance....for what exactly?
 
No1451 said:
Ahh, this is what I get for being 30 hours awake, haha. Do you intend to game? Are you comfortable enough with FreeBSD(or OpenIndiana, Solaris, etc) that you could use them day to day? And do you really really NEED your storage to be that fast? Looking at the configuration you wanted to run, it seems you want performance....for what exactly?
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He uses a massive computer with a RAID array and powerful video card which he takes to lan parties, where he does lots of gaming as well as seed torrents and the like... He also uses it at home for transcoding video and as a NAS. He WANTS it to be a single AIO box that is both a server and everything else.
 
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No I'm not planning to game inside a VM, I'll try'd that before...

No I'm not comfortable with FreeBSD, I have no freaking clue what it is, I only know I need it to have ZFS which sounds pretty good since this basically is a storage server. And I'm not planning to chill out on the server every day, the main reason'd I'm building it is to get the storage I'm tired of external hard drives and single drives which I don't know where I have what and loose internal hard drives because I couldn't fit it in my desktop PC.

When it comes to disk performance I don't really care, I'm good with 100-200 MB/s, but I like security and safety.

I wanted the ram because I hard ZFS use ALOT of ram, so I'm just confused and guessing around. The CPU power is for encoding and VM's I like to play around with VM's so. And the dual stocket is for upgradability, since I'm planning to have this machine for a while.

And I found the perfect HBA if anyone can help me out here, because this would be so much nicer then a 600 dollar areca raid controller.
 
Is that any good? Do it support Dual-link at the HP SAS Expander, do it support single link? And does it support FreeBSD?
 
The BR10i is an OEM LSI SAS3082E-R which is based on SAS/SATA 3.0gbps 1068e chipset.
So no it does not support dual linking.

I would look at getting a LSI 9211-8i. You are better off getting a Non-RAID HBA like the 9211 vs 9240 or Areca 16/18** because it does not have a XOR/RoC and thus will have lower latencies when used in JBOD/IT mode.

Look at this for LSI/OEM Equivalency http://forums.servethehome.com/showthread.php?19-LSI-RAID-Controller-HBA-Equivalency-Mapping
 
As was mentioned it doesn't support any of those things (well, the dual link) - but I thought you were building this up in a case to cart around with you? Are you really going to have enough drives that you need a sas expander/dual-link?
 
Just got Time Machine set up on my zfsguru server and am doing a backup of my macbook air as we speak. Its much nicer backing up over the network instead of having to plug in my 120gb usb drive. And no hacks needed on the mac.

install ports:
/usr/ports/net/netatalk
/usr/ports/net/howl

/etc/rc.conf
netatalk_enable="YES"
afpd_enable="YES"
cnid_metad_enable="YES"
mdnsresponder_enable="YES"
mdnsresponder_flags="-f /usr/local/etc/mDNSResponder.conf"

/usr/local/etc/mDNSResponder.conf
"Home Time Machine Server" _afpovertcp._tcp local. 548

/usr/local/etc/afpd.conf
"Time Machine" -uamlist uams_dhx2.so

AppleVolumes.default
/pee/timemachine/ "Time Machine" allow:mad:nfs options:tm

chmod 775 /pee/timemachine
 
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Just wondering about the Windows on BSD "solution." Will that be able to support something like XBMC to play stuff off the storage pool and is it possible via VirtualBox on ZFSGuru?
 
Mossy Lawn > Are you asking if you can run xbmc on the virtual box client streaming data from the pool? If so, this would only just be possible with very poor results.

And in any case you still need a pc with a vlc client to control the virtual pc (to view xbmc).

Why not just install xbmc live onto the physical pc and connect to the storage pool via SMB or nfs? This will give you the performance you need to watch movies, running it the other way would barely work.


Sub.mesa - how is the build coming along? :)

Paul
 
barbz said:
Mossy Lawn > Are you asking if you can run xbmc on the virtual box client streaming data from the pool? If so, this would only just be possible with very poor results.

And in any case you still need a pc with a vlc client to control the virtual pc (to view xbmc).

Why not just install xbmc live onto the physical pc and connect to the storage pool via SMB or nfs? This will give you the performance you need to watch movies, running it the other way would barely work.


Sub.mesa - how is the build coming along? :)

Paul
Click to expand...

I was thinking of running a win7 or Ubuntu with XBMC as a VM of ZFSGuru and streaming data from the pool. I was planning to control the VM via Remote Desktop from another machine.

Why would the result be poor, due to throughput or hardware issues?
 
zfsguru will need to share the data as SMB or NFS for your virtual client to read it.

Why wouldnt you just install XBMC on your desktop direct and stream from the same shares?

I would recommend you try it before spending any cash on it. Media does not play well on virtual machines regardless of the connection.
Paul
 
My two machines are an aging laptop that struggles with 1080p output and a HP Proliant Microserver I'm using as file storage, possibly using ZFSGuru. Thus I'm trying to see if I can just stick a cheap gfx card into the Microserver and use it as a HTPC of sorts.
 
the virtual machine will not use your physical video card in the server, it uses a virtual one and outputs to VNC.

Paul
 
I guess in that case I should put ZFSGuru in a VM then. I'll have a test and see later, but does anyone know what kind of performance hit I should be expecting?
 
Experiments I did got about a 1/3 native speed, and that was passing raw disks in. If you are running under esxi and can pass in the PCI controller, you can supposedly get almost native speed.
 
danswartz said:
Experiments I did got about a 1/3 native speed, and that was passing raw disks in. If you are running under esxi and can pass in the PCI controller, you can supposedly get almost native speed.
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It can be fairly good, these are my numbers for a 4 disk test with some old WD 750GB drives. Testing it natively resulted in numbers ~10-15% higher.

Benchmark said:
Performance Testing:

* Test Settings: TS32;
* Tuning: KMEM=15g; AMIN=5g; AMAX=7.5g;
* Stopping background processes: sendmail, moused, syslogd and cron
* Stopping Samba service

Now testing RAID0 configuration with 4 disks: cWmRd@cWmRd@cWmRd@
READ: 277 MiB/sec 272 MiB/sec 292 MiB/sec = 281 MiB/sec avg
WRITE: 259 MiB/sec 259 MiB/sec 256 MiB/sec = 258 MiB/sec avg

Now testing RAIDZ configuration with 4 disks: cWmRd@cWmRd@cWmRd@
READ: 244 MiB/sec 251 MiB/sec 247 MiB/sec = 247 MiB/sec avg
WRITE: 161 MiB/sec 171 MiB/sec 175 MiB/sec = 169 MiB/sec avg
Click to expand...
 
wow, what are your VM specifics? e.g. what is the host and how are the drives made visible to the guest?
 
danswartz said:
wow, what are your VM specifics? e.g. what is the host and how are the drives made visible to the guest?
Click to expand...

Xeon X3430
SM X8SIL
16GB Ram
2xSASUC8i

I gave the VM 10GB and 2xcores. The entire controllers are passed through
 
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Okay, that matches what I've seen and heard. Unfortunately for those of us without pass-thru, life is not so good. I've gone the other way - openindiana with gui and napp-it on top, with virtualbox also.
 
New Release: 0.1.8-preview3

Finally, I managed to release ZFSguru 0.1.8-preview3!

Very good news, I still have to make a proper changelog of all the changes; but under the hood there are many!


The most obvious changes from a user standpoint:
  • Now can use services; first real service is available for 8.2-002 system version: Virtualbox.
  • Now can format GPT with new boot code, which allows booting from sectorsize override pools, regardless of system version. Note: to use this you need to reformat your disks!
  • Now uses torrent for downloading new system images (and the new services), with fallback to direct HTTP download.
  • Faster pages due to caching remote files; this also makes ZFSguru rely less on a continuous internet connection.
  • Some bugfixes and other minor improvements.

Is this version a stable release?
Stability of GUI and new system image (8.2-002) should be good for production systems, pending first feedback from users. For production systems I would wait at least a week.

But please note that 0.1.8 does not have some services present in 0.1.7 release, such as iSCSI and panel for Samba and SSH. This will be the next focus for upcoming release (preview4?), hopefully in a few weeks.


What if I need iSCSI or want to keep using the Samba configuration page?
Then stay at 0.1.7 and upgrade to 0.1.8 final when it is released. The final should have everything the 0.1.7 release has, so be a viable upgrade path. For those who can live with limited services (iSCSI/Samba) then 0.1.8 is an option for a production system. Note that sharing via Samba does work on the Files page, but there is no separate GUI page for Samba yet.
 
One more note: when checking out the Virtualbox service and it tells you to reboot, you can skip that by executing this in the root command line:
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/lighttpd restart

That will restart the webserver which is required before phpvirtualbox will work. Now you can visit Services->Panel->Virtualbox and you should be ready to rock. So this works running off the LiveCD. :)
 
Hey Sub, do you know if ESXi can pass indavidual drives direct from an AMD chipset and present them to a ZFSguru VM to create a ZM pool.
 
Does not appear to be native mapping; it will be a SCSI device even if it in reality is an ATA device. So probably it will not support TRIM and other kinky features (TLER/CCTL/ERC/APM/AAM). I think the best mapping would be for the emulator to do nothing with the disk in question, and let the guest operating system have as much access to the disk itself, without an emulation layer in between.

So i could imagine all this converting done on every disk you create a passthrough for, would impact your speeds. It's also possible that it could affect your data security; if the emulation layer in between has any faults, it is possible this affects your data security as well.

The best thing is to simply try it, and run some heavy benchmarks for multiple days. I do maintain that a 'bare metal' installation (ZFSguru as host) would be alot better in terms of reliability and performance, but you can decide yourself if the performance hit is acceptable to you.
 
I tried the esxi physical drive pass through and the performance was so-so. About the same as if the host was virtualbox or proxmox. I think the only way to get really good perf with pass through is full pci pass through of a controller, and that requires fairly new mobo/cpu.
 
Ugg I was trying to avoid having to buy a non raid HBA type card. I guess it will be needed if I want to have only 1 server rather then 2 smaller ones.
 
danswartz said:
I tried the esxi physical drive pass through and the performance was so-so. About the same as if the host was virtualbox or proxmox. I think the only way to get really good perf with pass through is full pci pass through of a controller, and that requires fairly new mobo/cpu.
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Is this an Intel only feature? Does AMD support this at all. I just upgraded my main rig from a PII 940BE, 790GX board, and 8GB ram to a Sandy Bridge setup. I was going to try and keep the old setup and turn it into a ESXi or Hyper-V server. I want to run a ZFS flavor VM, but it sounds like full pass through is the only way to go.
 
No, AMD has it too, but it is a fairly new feature, and the cpu+bios+mobo all have to support it.
 
I need samba (unless someone can tell me a Win7 compatible alternative)

Can you link torrents? I'm going to seed them on the seedboxes I have
 
@vraa: the 0.1.8 releases do have Samba, and basic sharing through the Files page works; but there is no separate interface like in 0.1.7 for additional Samba configuration. You can edit smb.conf by hand though; or just wait a week or so for next preview which should have iSCSI, Samba and SSH functionality restored.

Torrent link is in the announcement, and also on the download page. Or were you referring to torrent link for the services? I don't have those public yet.
 
sub.mesa said:
@vraa: the 0.1.8 releases do have Samba, and basic sharing through the Files page works; but there is no separate interface like in 0.1.7 for additional Samba configuration. You can edit smb.conf by hand though; or just wait a week or so for next preview which should have iSCSI, Samba and SSH functionality restored.

Torrent link is in the announcement, and also on the download page. Or were you referring to torrent link for the services? I don't have those public yet.
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So I will just wait a week

Thanks for all your hardwork, ZFS Guru is THE BOMB
 
sub...

Is Guru compatible with pc-bsd if the interface is set up manually as outlined in your installation guides?

Thanks..
 
Hey Sub,

Have you done any zfs send/receive between the experimental BSD version and real solaris-based ZFS systems like NexentaCore or OpenIndiana?

Just wondering on the stability and interoperability of it as long as the zpool versions are compatible, etc..
 
wingfat said:
sub...

Is Guru compatible with pc-bsd if the interface is set up manually as outlined in your installation guides?

Thanks..
Click to expand...

I have literally JUST finished an installation of ZFSGuru on PC-BSD.

Everything works fine, just be aware that the lighttpd instructions aren't up to date. The .conf file isn't where the instructions on the ZFSGuru site says they are.
 
I found the same thing. Unfortunately, I found that running virtualbox with freebsd as the host sucks. Specifically, the network performance. I am trying it the other way around now - e.g. zfsguru on top of esxi with the 5 sata drives passed in as raw luns. Much much better. It is not a virtualbox issue, since I tried virtualbox on ubuntu and the network performance was cool. I think it is some major lossage with the virtio-net driver on freebsd (host).
 
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danswartz said:
I found the same thing. Unfortunately, I found that running virtualbox with freebsd as the host sucks. Specifically, the network performance. I am trying it the other way around now - e.g. zfsguru on top of esxi with the 5 sata drives passed in as raw luns. Much much better. It is not a virtualbox issue, since I tried virtualbox on ubuntu and the network performance was cool. I think it is some major lossage with the virtio-net driver on freebsd (host).
Click to expand...

How are you sharing out your pool? Are you using Samba or NFS? I ask only because while my network performance seems solid SMB is just bloody awful and terribly prone to crazy-ass fluctuations.
 
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