ZFS & CPU Usage

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gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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All current OpenZFS systems support Pool v5000/ZFS v5 with the same basic feature set so unless you do not use a very special feature you can move pools between BSD (FreeNAS, NAS4Free, ZFSGuru), Illumos (NexentaStor,OmniOS, OpenIndiana, SmartOS) and Linux (ZoL).

With Oracle Solaris you can only exchange pools in the older V28/ZFS5 format as Oracle does not support Pool v5000 and OpenZFS does not support Pool V.29-35 or ZFS v.6.
 
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JayG30

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Feb 23, 2015
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On that point, moving BSD to OmniOS or vice versa, are you sure there are no issues?

Specifically FreeNAS does some disk identification and assigns gptid numbers. It also creates a 2GB swap partition on each disk by default. I think FreeBSD does the same thing with gptid now but not sure. And I know that FreeNAS can get messed up if you try to issue some commands at the CLI instead of through the GUI due to this "identification and keeping track" that it does. For instance I just recently found out that you can't offline a disk through the CLI, you have to do it through the GUI. If you do you will have to reboot the server to fix the problem.

I do believe I've taken a FreeNAS pool and imported it into OmniOS/Napp-IT and it worked, although some FreeNAS quirkiness is still left over (like the swap partitions).
 

T_Minus

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Feb 15, 2015
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I was more concerned with moving the entire thing "as is" from say E5-2620 v1 to E5-2683 v3... wasn't sure how OmniOS handled that or if ZFS cares at all.

I'd be MUCH MORE concerned moving the file system between OS's but maybe it's no biggy?
 

JayG30

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I can tell you ZFS has no issue moving a pool from hardware to hardware. You can pull the disks out and put them into another server and they will work the same. Just make sure the hardware is supported and correct to be running ZFS.

Moving from OS to OS theoretically should work. And it does. The only issue I think are outside ZFS and more an issue with the base OS and how they use/implement ZFS. Basically what I'm mentioned about BSD vs Solaris for disk ID, partitioning. And obviously shares (CIFS, NFS, etc).
 

MatrixMJK

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The only time I had issues moving ZFS from OS to OS (aside from making sure the versions match, covered in this and other threads) was going from FreeNAS to OmniOS or Solaris. FreeNAS does add some slices to the disks before the ZFS vdevs. I don't remember for sure if it fully prevented me from importing the pool, or just made it harder. I was doing it as a portability test so no real data. The results made me use a 'lowest common denominator' for my future ZFS plans. Now I just have a Solaris 11.2 VM with PCIe passthru, and create any pools there as v.28 and export them. FreeNAS and all other OS/ZFS combos import them just fine.
 

gea

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Move v5000 pools from FreeNAS to Solaris:

- no problem regarding ZFS. But there can be problems with FreeNAS partitions.
You should use either Geom on FreeNAS or use the whole disk with GPT partitions.
 

JayG30

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Yea, FreeNAS warns against turning off their "swap" on each disk. However no other ZFS implementation does this. So I honestly just turn it off. If you are hitting swap you should be adding RAM. If you really want to you can add another disk/usb stick for swap.

This way the whole disk is partitioned for ZFS. I think it uses GPT partitioning by default, but not sure.
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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as long as the ZFS pool versions are compatible.
This is crucial, nice catch, I have run into pains where I was on a up-reved ZFS/zpool release from Solaris and OpenSolaris/OmniOS/FreeNAS all had issues importing. Had to resort to a zfs send/recv and reformat the ZFS pool to get to my desired end-state (off proprietary Solaris zfs release and onto Illumos base).
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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All current OpenZFS systems support Pool v5000/ZFS v5 with the same basic feature set so unless you do not use a very special feature you can move pools between BSD (FreeNAS, NAS4Free, ZFSGuru), Illumos (NexentaStor,OmniOS, OpenIndiana, SmartOS) and Linux (ZoL).

With Oracle Solaris you can only exchange pools in the older V28/ZFS5 format as Oracle does not support Pool v5000 and OpenZFS does not support Pool V.29-35 or ZFS v.6.
All current OpenZFS systems support Pool v5000/ZFS v5 with the same basic feature set so unless you do not use a very special feature you can move pools between BSD (FreeNAS, NAS4Free, ZFSGuru), Illumos (NexentaStor,OmniOS, OpenIndiana, SmartOS) and Linux (ZoL).

With Oracle Solaris you can only exchange pools in the older V28/ZFS5 format as Oracle does not support Pool v5000 and OpenZFS does not support Pool V.29-35 or ZFS v.6.
Perfect explanation Gea! Yep that was the deal w/ what I remember I was stuck in a upreved 31-33 version trying to come back to v28 compat pool stuff. v5000 and individually flagged feature sets sure make things easier these days in ZFS-land.