Most User Friendly ZFS OS for shared storage

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IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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I'm looking to migrate my VM datastore off of VMware VSAN and to a shared storage solution. I have no experience with ZFS or any Solaris platforms/forks. What would be the easiest/most user friendly (yet high performance) option for setting up an all SSD shared storage solution to present to my ESXi hosts?
 

azev

Well-Known Member
Jan 18, 2013
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Cant go wrong with either freenas (vaai supported) or Napp-it
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
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Another strong vote for FreeNAS. I deliver close to 3Gbps via NFS and 4 Gbps via iSCSI throughput off of a FreeNAS setup w/ 8 ssd's in a r10 config for my vSphere storage.
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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Any other source for DLing the Napp-it OVA other than off the official website? Right now it's DLing at 300KB/s and will take 3 hours.

@gea?
The download location is Germany. From another internet provider in Germany download time is usually < 30min for the 3GB file. It increases when connectivity to your provider is slow or with several concurrent downloads.

You can also download the OS iso for OmniOS, the free Solaris clone, install and add napp-it per wget. Vmware tools can be added per pkg install from the default repo.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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Another strong vote for FreeNAS. I deliver close to 3Gbps via NFS and 4 Gbps via iSCSI throughput off of a FreeNAS setup w/ 8 ssd's in a r10 config for my vSphere storage.
Have you compared other Open-ZFS platforms or genuine Oracle Solaris ZFS?

From most comparisons that I have seen, network performance on BSD, Linux or Solarish can be similar, can differ depending on quality of drivers where general driver support is mostly Linux > BSD > Solarish. ZFS performance is mostly best with genuine Oracle Solaris with a slight advantage of the free Solaris forks over the other Open-ZFS options, propably because the whole internal memory organisation of Open-ZFS is yet based on Solaris memory management (There are efforts to make this platform independent).

In many comparisons NFS on Solarish (where NFS comes from, just like ZFS) is slightly faster than on BSD/ FreeNAS. The multithreaded Solaris SMB server is also often a little faster than SAMBA on any platform (beside SMB3 improvements that are only available currently on the Illumos distribution NexentaStor5, not on others like OmniOS/OI or Oracle Solaris unless you use SAMBA on Solarish).

Whether you prefer the Web-Gui on FreeNAS/Nas4Free/ZFSGuru on BSD or OMV on Linux or napp-it/ NexentaStor on Solarish is a different question. Basically the performance/feature relevant question is BSD vs Linux vs Solarish as it is the OS that really counts not the Web-Gui.
 
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IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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Another strong vote for FreeNAS. I deliver close to 3Gbps via NFS and 4 Gbps via iSCSI throughput off of a FreeNAS setup w/ 8 ssd's in a r10 config for my vSphere storage.
Are those speeds typical? Is the protocol itself your bottleneck? I would have thought with all SSD's (and 10Gb networking?) that you'd be able to do better.
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
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Well that's real world sVMotion activity I can see that on the backend array, synthetic tests I am sure would yield better results but those I am not terribly interested in. :-D
 

ekke

Member
Nov 16, 2015
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Nexenta would be nice if the community edition wasnt crippled by its limitation :"
NexentaStor 5.0
Community Edition


Free version for up to 10TB of allocated storage."

I like their dashboard
 

wildchild

Active Member
Feb 4, 2014
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Use omios and napp-it .
Very friendly, and complete downloadable as a ovf

Verstuurd vanaf mijn ZP920+ met Tapatalk
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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There are sooooooooo many options...Napp-it/NexentaStor on the Solaris side, FreeNAS/NAS4Free/ZFSGuru on the BSD side, OMV/OpenAttic on the Linux side...and that doesn't even include them all. It's going to be impossible to for me to test drive them all :eek:.
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Don't forget abt straight up ZoL using CentOS7/Ubuntu 16.04/latest :-D

My take, look for one w/ replication if you intend/desire to replicate to another 'like' system. In FreeNAS/Napp-it on Omni you can surely use ZFS replication in an easy manner, no lic for FreeNAS but that's not to say that napp-it isn't worth every penny required to get that license for intra-systems replication but you all know what side of the fence I fall on these days. :-D
 
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IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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Don't forget abt straight up ZoL using CentOS7/Ubuntu 16.04/latest :-D

My take, look for one w/ replication if you intend/desire to replicate to another 'like' system. In FreeNAS/Napp-it on Omni you can surely use ZFS replication in an easy manner, no lic for FreeNAS but that's not to say that napp-it isn't worth every penny required to get that license for intra-systems replication but you all know what side of the fence I fall on these days. :-D
I definitely want the most functionality I can get from a FREE product. I always pay for VMUG to get VMware licensing on my home network, I don't want to have to drop anymore $ to license my home network.
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Imma vote against FreeNAS 10 just yet while still in beta, should be nearing GA but until then 9.10 for sure is my vote! ROCK SOLID!
 

IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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I'd recommend Nexenta/Nappit or FreeNAS 10.
Imma vote against FreeNAS 10 just yet while still in beta, should be nearing GA but until then 9.10 for sure is my vote! ROCK SOLID!
I'm going to look at Nexenta tonight. I looked at Napp-it and I really don't like the UI. Very superficial I know and doesn't matter to many but it's just one of those things that bothers me if it's too stripped down.

I'll probably compare Nexenta and FreeNAS 9.10 for now and see which one is more intuitive for my liking.
 

i386

Well-Known Member
Mar 18, 2016
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Germany
Nexenta would be nice if the community edition wasnt crippled by its limitation :"
NexentaStor 5.0
Community Edition


Free version for up to 10TB of allocated storage."

I like their dashboard
10tb? Did nexenta lower the limitation? When I researched zfs for a server a while ago, it was like 15 or 18 tb.
 

DaSaint

Active Member
Oct 3, 2015
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Colorado
@IamSpartacus

I am curious on the path you went on this, i have been using OMNIOS for a long time TBH lately with the news that they were changing and Freenas Coral going the way they were going i am not sure which rabbit hole i want to go down anymore. I am still thinking FreeNAS due to their compatibility to Mellanox Adapters ConnextX-3 (40Gbe) adapters..

Just wanted an outside opinion that went through a similar deal. I never seemed to get the greatest NFS performace from OMNIOS and also if DNS went down OMNI would crap itself even with a /etc/hosts file if the DC's went offline... i get Random spikes in latency too even though i'm running good ZIL and Cache devices...

I have about 30TB of Data on my Current OMNI system and plan to add about another 30TB