FreeNAS 10 and OmniOS not compatible

[Flintstone]

I am trying out FreeNAS 10 (in ESXi 6 for now), seeing if it can replace ESXi + OmniOS. So I created a 10-disk volume and played around with that for a bit. Then installed Omni in another VM and tried to import the volume - thinking that would be peace of cake. No such luck. 3 of the 10 disks was marked as faulted and no way to import the volume. I have no idea what that FreeNAS bunch is doing besides creating a fancy (and to a large extent redundant) UI - but that was scary. I have been using ZFS since the launch of Solaris 10 in 2005, and have had no real problems (besides a scary situation with dedupe in 2010).

I will investigate more, but does anyone else have experience with co-managing ZFS volumes across those two platforms? I have several servers and want to be able to move drives between them not worrying about the origin of the volume.

 

[gea]

I would try to format disks on BSD with GEOM
or GPT but only if the partition spans the whole disk

 

[whitey]

I think the freenas folks were for some time anyways doing some funny business w/ swap files per disk so each device had two partitions on it instead of zpool create w/ 'whole disk/s'

FWIW, I always ZFS send/recv between FreeNAS/Omni systems, that's how i migrated between the two anyways although i could have sworn I have done a zfs export/import between OmniOS and FreeNAS 9.3 at some point if memory serves me correct.

Maybe if I have some time today I'll test this as well and see what I get.

 

[Flintstone]

Yes of course. I might have forgotten to disable the cache on that system. Anyway - I deleted the disks in Omni and now FreeNAS refuses to boot (!). Go figure! Might give it another chance and another install just to know how to configure for friends/family who insists on FreeNAS. For me it seems like they have done to many "clever" things for their own good.

If OmniOS was as easy to install as SmartOS - and the Napp-it interface got a facelift - it would be a better contender for alot of people. I am a bit scared about the driver support over time in OmniOS but running in a VM it should work ok for a long time.

 

[JayG30]

As mentioned, I know freenas creates the 2GB swap by default. This "swap" also means disks have GPT and the disks in the pool are referenced by GPT ID. Clear explanation HERE. I'm not sure but think BSD might even do GPT as well by default. I'm not sure if this becomes an issue for Omni or Linux.

Then I remember freenas introduced new ZFS features that weren't supported by other implementations at the time. hole_birth comes to mind. But again not sure the support level of other non-BSD systems for that at this point. I don't really blame freenas/bsd for that, others were just slow to adopt those features.

Freenas 10 is currently in Beta. I know they are introducing lots of changes outside the GUI. I believe there are large changes to zfs send/receive for instance. It could be that they have introduced/implemented a feature before other OS implementations have adopted it.

 

[Aestr]

I migrated successfully to FreeNAS by importing my OmniOS created pool so it certainly is possible. You have a lot of variables in play running in a VM with disks passed through, and 3 of 10 disks marked as faulted doesn't solely point to FreeNAS being the issue. It certainly might be, but there's also a chance you could get this to work. As mentioned FreeNAS10 is in beta, so it might be worth trying the current stable version of 9.10.

 

[Patrick]

I was at iXsystems yesterday and FreeNAS 10 has a lot changing compared to 9.x.

 

[Fritz]

Anybody know when 10 will officially be released?

 

[GCM]

Anybody know when 10 will officially be released?

From the people I've talked to @ Ix, they're saying November.

 

[GCM]

Also, AWS plugin is coming in November for TrueNAS, unsure if it's being implemented in FreeNAS.

 

[Hank C]

can upgrade from 9.10 to 10.x?