ZFS is flexible and will let you name and organize datasets however you choose–but before you start building datasets there’s some ways to make management easier in the long term. I’ve found the following convention works well for me. It’s not “the” way by any means, but I hope you will find it helpful, I … Read more
Playing with bhyve Here’s a look at Gea’s popular All-in-one design which allows VMware to run on top of ZFS on a single box using a virtual 10Gbe storage network. The design requires an HBA and a CPU that supports VT-d so that the storage can be passed directly to a guest VM running a ZFS … Read more
Updated October 19, 2022. Today’s question comes from Jeff…. Q. What drives should I buy for my ZFS server? Answer: Here’s what I recommend, considering a balance of cost per TB, performance, and reliability. I prefer NAS or Enterprise-class drives since they are designed to run 24/7 and also are better at tolerating vibration from … Read more
2015-01-07: I’ve updated this post to to reflect changes in FreeNAS 9.3. I’ve been using OpenIndiana since late 2011 and switched to OmniOS in 2013. Lately I started testing FreeNAS, what drove me to do this is I use CrashPlan to backup my pool but recently Code 42 announced they’ll be discontinuing … Read more
The other day I got a little frustrated with my Gen 8 Microserver, I was trying to upgrade ESXi to 5.5 but the virtual media feature kept disconnecting in the middle of the install due to not having an ILO4 license–I actually bought an ILO4 enterprise license but I have no idea where I put … Read more
I messed up my zpool with a stuck log device, and rather than try to fix it I decided to wipe out the zpool and restore the zfs datasets using CrashPlan. It took CrashPlan roughly a week to restore all my data (~1TB) which is making me consider local backups. All permissions intact. Dirty VM … Read more
I’m in the progress of switching my ZFS Server from OpenIndiana to OmniOS, mainly because OmniOS is designed only to be a server system so it’s a little cleaner, and they have a stable production release that’s commercially supported, and it has become Gea’s OS of choice for Napp-It. One of the last things I … Read more