Running ZFS on Ubuntu vs Freenas and ZFS in the cloud

[Hjalti Atlason]

Hey Guys

I was thinking if anyone in this forum might answer me couple of things i don´t know the answers to myself.

1) I know you can run ZFS on a virtual machine if you do PCI passthrough (with LSI controller with the 2008 chipset). But i´m wondering who provides a good service running ZFS in the cloud and what platform/Distro is available running ZFS in the cloud (I´ve heard digital Ocean offers block storage) and i´m thinking about a good way of deploying ZFS for example using AWS , Azure and Digital Ocean. Any pointers of what is a good way of running ZFS using these services ?

2) ZFS is only supported for data storage, not the root filesystem on Ubuntu 16.04 Server , what are the main disadvantages running ZFS on Ubuntu vs running ZFS on Freenas/Freebsd (what is the gain of having ZFS running on the root filesystem) ? Anyone ?

Cheers

Hjalti

 

[MiniKnight]

Can I ask why ZFS in the cloud? Is it just for testing? If you are just testing you can simply create additional virtual disks and attach them to the VM for ZFS disks.

Cloud storage is made to not use ZFS.

 

[Hjalti Atlason]

Can I ask why ZFS in the cloud? Is it just for testing? If you are just testing you can simply create additional virtual disks and attach them to the VM for ZFS disks.

Cloud storage is made to not use ZFS.

Sure , just wondering for example if i want to setup a webserver and store the data/database on a ZFS pool.
Ubuntu server 16.04 sounds good if i can use it using these services.

 

[PigLover]

...2) ZFS is only supported for data storage, not the root filesystem on Ubuntu 16.04 Server , what are the main disadvantages running ZFS on Ubuntu vs running ZFS on Freenas/Freebsd (what is the gain of having ZFS running on the root filesystem) ? Anyone ?

Cheers

Hjalti

ZFS is supported for the root file system on Ubuntu - its just that the installer won't set it up for you. The manual procedure to install it is a PITA, but it works reliably.

Google "ZFS root Ubuntu 16.04".

 

[Hjalti Atlason]

ZFS is supported for the root file system on Ubuntu - its just that the installer won't set it up for you. The manual procedure to install it is a PITA, but it works reliably.

Google "ZFS root Ubuntu 16.04".

Thanks , do you know what is the gain of having ZFS running on the root filesystem ?

 

[T_Minus]

Thanks , do you know what is the gain of having ZFS running on the root filesystem ?

The benefits of ZFS don't change ???

 

[Hjalti Atlason]

The benefits of ZFS don't change ???

Just wondering if there is any performance difference.

2 disks are faster than one disk , and if i want to use the maximum throughput of 10 Gigabit Ethernet NIC
my calculation is i need 12 disks in a ZFS pool (if one disk uses 100 megabytes per second X 12 ) to fill up a
10 Gigabit Ethernet NIC.

I might want to have a option of running a really fast Web server on a ZFS data pool.

 

[T_Minus]

As mentioned it doesn't matter if it's an OS on ZFS or your data pool on ZFS the Pros and Cons of ZFS will remain.

You will see a performance hit with ZFS, and 12 disks in RAID0 is a terrible idea and also very likely won't come close to maxing out 10Gig by themselves.

You may not be running Napp-IT/OmniOS but @gea has some good documents on various configurations of ZFS he's tested on 10Gig networks with SSD, HDD, various SLOG devices (NVME, SSD, etc...) and should shine some light on what to expect. I would use that as a starting point for the numbers you're after.

 

[Hjalti Atlason]

As mentioned it doesn't matter if it's an OS on ZFS or your data pool on ZFS the Pros and Cons of ZFS will remain.

You will see a performance hit with ZFS, and 12 disks in RAID0 is a terrible idea and also very likely won't come close to maxing out 10Gig by themselves.

You may not be running Napp-IT/OmniOS but @gea has some good documents on various configurations of ZFS he's tested on 10Gig networks with SSD, HDD, various SLOG devices (NVME, SSD, etc...) and should shine some light on what to expect. I would use that as a starting point for the numbers you're after.

Thanks
I´m actually not thinking about Raid0 but Raid 1+0 , the disks still use the Throughput of the NIC when writing data for example to a database.

 

[Hjalti Atlason]

But of course in the cloud there is no HBA to connect the CPU and Memory to the disks.

 

[Marcus Dillury]

But i´m wondering who provides a good service running ZFS in the cloud and what platform/Distro is available running ZFS in the cloud (I´ve heard digital Ocean offers block storage) and i´m thinking about a good way of deploying ZFS for example using AWS , Azure and Digital Ocean.

A couple of cloud providers I've come across offering cloud based zfs, are solnode.com and rsync.net. I dont know much about rsync.net, but ive been using solnode for zfs replication to the cloud for sometime, without any issues.

 

[Hjalti Atlason]

A couple of cloud providers I've come across offering cloud based zfs, are solnode.com and rsync.net. I dont know much about rsync.net, but ive been using solnode for zfs replication to the cloud for sometime, without any issues.

Thanks for the tip, i´ll look into this , Native FreeNAS integration sounds good.
But the location of the solnode Datacenters might be an issue for me since i´m located on the other end of the world (Iceland).