OpenMediaVault and ZFS - It works?

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vl1969

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
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MiniKnight said:
I'm interested too.

@vl1969 do you have OMV + Proxmox and ZFS working?!? I saw this thread OMV on Proxmox - openmediavault

Sorry for tagging you randomly but I saw the same profile pic and same username and thought there was a chance you're the same as on the OMV forums.
Click to expand...
yes I am the same :p
and no I do not have it working at the moment.
I was doing some research and testing earlier but got sidetracked a bit so have not had a chance to build out my actual setup.
that said, I had a virtual build mostly working.
I some times have free time at work where I can test thing in Hyper-V setup.
so I have build out a Proxmox VE 4.4 in Hyper-V VM.
than tried the OMV VM under that.

problem is the in nested build the networking is not operable.
the Proxmox VM works and can access the outside network just fine.
but any VM under that is SOL. no networking of any kind. so can not really test all I want.

again that said, I am not sure I would go with OMV and ZFS. it is not native support, what if something goes wrong?
OMV does not have native ZFS support. it is an add-on.
my plans have never been on using ZFS for OMV.
I plan to install Proxmox on ZFS Raid-1 on the server (the real hardware)
and than either pass-through the data disks into OMV VM (my data is on BTRFS volumes anyhow)
or mount them in Proxmox m as it supports btrfs , and NFS mount or bind-mount them into VM the in OMV VM for management.
I even contemplating to install WebMin alongside Proxmox and use that to do the data disk management on the host it self.
like so:
do Proxmox setup (2x120 SSD in ZFS raid-1) . it is supported by proxmox VE 4.3 install.
install webmin on the host as well.
use webmin to mount the data disk. I have about 7 3 and 2 TB disks most of them are empty as I only have just under 3TB of data at the moment. so I can build out a BTRFS raid-10 volume staring with 4 disks and than moving data to it and adding the emptying disk to the volume, or better yet just make sure all thew data is on my external backup and just format all and build out a raid-10 btrfs volume in one shot. than move data from backup.

mount the data vol in proxmox and do nfs share for it.
than just mount nfs share with in OMV VM and manage the sharing the actual data folder from there. with Samba. I can NFS mount all I want into any VM or PC as needed but basic network shares will be done from OMV. of I can skip the OMV and add samba sharing from host using webmin for management.
than I would simply use OMV VM to run apps that it support with plugins.
I like OMV but it has not a good support for virtualization which I want.
 
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ellnic

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Aug 8, 2017
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I know this is old now but I came across it whilst looking for something else and wanted to add something relating to OMV and Zfs.

OMV and Zfs work fantastically. The ZoL (Zfs on Linux) guys do a fantastic job, and Zfs on Linux is solid. The OMV guys equally do amazing things. Not only for OMV full stop - but for providing the Zfs functionality with arguably the best open NAS project.

The reason that OMV does not come with Zfs is because Linux cannot come with Zfs. This is a licensing issue and you will find years of reading on the mind numbing subject via Google. In short, Zfs is CDDL and the Linux kernel is GPLv2. OMV is Debian based - and thus, like every other Linux distro, cannot come with Zfs. This does not stop you from adding it after installation though, which is what the OMV plugin does.

I have been using Zfs on Linux, with and without OMV for years. It's never let me down. Kudos to both teams.

Edit, additional info: Regarding importing a FreeNAS pool into OMV - there is no reason why this should not work providing that the ZoL version is the same or newer than the FreeNAS version. There was a time a while back that ZoL version in Debian and FreeBSD were a bit out of sync and this caused you not to be able to import FreeNAS to ZoL on Debian as FreeNAS had a newer version. You could go Debian to FreeNAS though. It was something to do with feature flags. I do not know what the current state of this is, though. If the versions and flags are the same or newer in the OS where you are moving the pool to, there is no reason to believe it will not work. Maybe try with a small test pool first.
 
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ellnic

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Aug 8, 2017
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Even more info.

I decided to take a pool from one of my Linux boxes and import into one of my Macs. Macs are Unix and OpenZFS provides ZFS functionality on Mac.

When I get the status of the pool, this is displayed:

Code: 
Mac-Pro:~ ellnic$ zpool status Tank

  pool: Tank

 state: ONLINE

status: Some supported features are not enabled on the pool. The pool can

still be used, but some features are unavailable.

action: Enable all features using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done,

the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support

the features. See zpool-features(5) for details.
This says that the ZFS version on the Mac (BSD) or at least, what the OpenZFS guys are doing is a little ahead of ZoL.

Just make sure you don't want to move it back before doing a zpool upgrade.
 
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