Introduction Yes, this post was created on April 1. No, it's not an April Fool's joke. So, I need to begin with post with a story. In 2007, I adopted my daughter, and my wife decided that she wanted to stay home rather than work. In 2008, she quit her job. She was running a […]
This post gets filed under the "budget and planning" part of systems administration. When planning out your ZFS storage pool, you will need to make decision about space efficiency, and the cost required to build out that architecture. We've heard over and over that ZFS block deduplication is expensive, and I've even mentioned it on […]
Introduction With the proliferation of ZFS into FreeBSD, Linux, FreeNAS, Illumos, and many other operating systems, and with the introduction of OpenZFS to unify all the projects under one collective whole, more and more people are beginning to tinker with ZFS in many different situations. Some install it on their main production servers, others install […]
Introduction This comes from the "why didn't I think of this before?!" department. I have lying around my home and office a ton of USB 2.0 thumb drives. I have six 16GB drives and eight 8GB drives. So, 14 drives in total. I have two hypervisors in a GlusterFS storage cluster, and I just happen […]
Background While taking a walk around the city with the rest of the system administration team at work today (we have our daily "admin walk"), a discussion came up about asynchronous writes and the contents of the ZFS Intent Log. Previously, as shown in the Table of Contents, I blogged about the ZIL in great […]
Lately, a few coworkers and myself decided to put our workstations into a GlusterFS cluster. We wanted to test distributed replication. Our workstations are already running ZFS on Linux, so we built two datasets on each of our workstations, and made them the bricks for GlusterFS. We created a nested "brick" directory to prevent GlusterFS […]
Best Practices As with all recommendations, some of these guidelines carry a great amount of weight, while others might not. You may not even be able to follow them as rigidly as you would like. Regardless, you should be aware of them. I’ll try to provide a reason why for each. They’re listed in no […]
Motivation Just as with Zpool properties, datasets also contain properties that can be changed. Because datasets are where you actually store your data, there are quite a bit more than with storage pools. Further, properties can be inherited from parent datasets. Again, not every property is tunable. Many are read-only. But, this again gives us […]
I spent the previous week celebrating the Christmas holiday with family and friends, and as a result, took a break from blogging. However, other than the New Year, I'm finished with holidays for a while, and eager to get back to blogging, and finishing off this series. Only handful of posts left to go. So, […]
What is a ZVOL? A ZVOL is a "ZFS volume" that has been exported to the system as a block device. So far, when dealing with the ZFS filesystem, other than creating our pool, we haven't dealt with block devices at all, even when mounting the datasets. It's almost like ZFS is behaving like a […]
Now that you're a pro at snapshots, we can move to one of the crown jewels of ZFS- the ability to send and receive full filesystems from one host to another. This is epic, and I am not aware of any other filesystem that can do this without the help of 3rd party tools, such […]
Snapshots with ZFS are similar to snapshots with Linux LVM. A snapshot is a first class read-only filesystem. It is a mirrored copy of the state of the filesystem at the time you took the snapshot. Think of it like a digital photograph of the outside world. Even though the world is changing, you have […]
Compression Compression is transparent with ZFS if you enable it. This means that every file you store in your pool can be compressed. From your point of view as an application, the file does not appear to be compressed, but appears to be stored uncompressed. In other words, if you run the "file" command on […]
We now begin down the path that is the "bread and butter" of ZFS, known as "ZFS datasets", or filesystems. Previously, up to this point, we've been discussing how to manage our storage pools. But storage pools are not meant to store data directly. Instead, we should create filesystems that share the same storage system. […]
Before we can get into the practical administration of ZFS datasets, we need to understand exactly how ZFS is storing our data. So, this post will be theoretical, and cover a couple concepts that you will want to understand. Namely the the Merkle tree and copy-on-write. I'll try and keep it at a higher level […]