An Oracle ZFS Storage All in One Appliance for your Home Lab

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whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Thanks @Rand__ for getting me the appliance, once I whipped out my magic crystal ball and got over the OVA madness (wouldn't deploy cleanly in vSphere 6.5 web client) I finally resorted to 7zip decompress and fed all the files into web client and it worked. No need for any other tricks messing w/ vmkfstools or low level Unix boot env trickery...just worked, passed a HBA through, detected disk, setup NFS/SMB. Nice analytics/dashboard for sure but probably won't sway me off of FreeNAS by any stretch of the imagination.
 
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whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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anyone have this fired up in an esxi 6 environment that would like to export an .ova for the cheering crowd???\

anyone.. bueler.. bueler...
I can do this at this point if still needed?

EDIT: Apparently I cannot be bothered w/ reading a thread end-to-end, see you've already got this handled :-D
 

the_dude

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Jan 12, 2018
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The UI is very responsive.
The analytical possibilities are AWESOME.
zpool version 43
I would really, really, REALLY like to use this, BUT...

You are limited in how you setup your pool, like, not possible to setup a 3-disk raidz1 (that's actually what I want to use it for: 2x 3-disk-raidz1 pool and no, I'm not ready to change that (yet)).
No way to select which disk goes into what pool.
Any "manual fiddling" with the system will mostlikely end up in a crashing frontend (you do get a big warning that all actions are logged and you loose all support from here on (yeah, whatever)).
I would not risk importing an existing pool. It might run in the background, but so far, managing a manually created pool with the appliance allways ended in a crashing UI.

Well, in the end it IS an appliance / pre-build system. So, if you're fine with the best-practice decissions Oracle made in the appliance and have a few hundred HDDs of the same type lying around, go for it!!

If anyone finds a way to freely configure the pool and still be able to manage it with the appliance, LET ME KNOW!!!!!!!
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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I only had 1 husmm 200 gb sas ssd to play with so I guess I just took it for granted that ALL supported ZFS pool schemes would be available. I did see the shell option and nastygram while looking for zfs/zpool cmds although the TUI interface for stg appliance mgmt did seem fairly functional.
 
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dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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@the_dude

hey man.. i found the same issue.. that raidz wants 4 or more vdevs. since this is an 'appliance' I think the sun engineers are making lots of assuptions to make this idiot proof for storage admins that dont want to learn or care about managing zfs at the command line..

if you try to put 2 pools on the appliance with the same configuration .. like 2 pools each a 2 disk stripe.. it will do it but complain that this is not best practice and you should just make the original pool larger.

to witt... I think they don't allow 3 drive raidz as its overhead is close enough to mirror that they prefer you use that.. and 4 disk 'fit' physically better in the appliance..

now.. to the fix.. I know.. tldr... you can drop into the command line by ssh into the appliance and type shell... you will get a full page warning on how this is the end of the world, you will void your warantee etc.. but just build your pool with the command line.. it will show up or be importably by the BUI/GUI and there you go..

the big issues for me using this right now is there does not seem to be a way to update.. or get security patches. you really cant tell what sun is using under the hood, uname -a tells you nothing about the underlying system and its been heavily modified according to orical hence the warnings about doing anything from the command line.

second is pool compatibility.. oracle is EOL and when this becomes unstable/unusable without further updates the only way to get the data off is with network copy to a openzfs based filer, that is provided it is still stable enough to stay up long enough for the zfs send ...

I also am trying to get my head around the wierd language they use for datasets --> projects.. etc.. an under the hood there is a very weird structure as to how they name and mount datasets... again.. to make it idiot proof it gets more complicated under the hood.

also, there seems like there is considerable resources being used for appliance storage... likely the survivable arc cache etc..

its very interesting and would love to play with it on my esxi all-in-one but since my existing pools are not compatible its not worth starting over with 20TB of storage on line to get into a closed, dead end OS...