Hello all, I''ve been thinking about using an OpenSolaris fileserver for my home network. There are several things which are important to me in this situation and I''d like to know how ZFS handles them. I''ve been reading the ZFS Administration Guide from Sun and I''ve looked over a few of the wiki pages available here and on Sun''s site but I am still by no means an expert. So, on to my questions. First, does RaidZ support disks of multiple sizes, or must each RaidZ set consist of equal sized disks? Secondly, can you add disks to a RaidZ set after it''s been created and added to the pool? Thirdly, for a relatively low usage pattern such as a home fileserver, is > 1GB of RAM really necessary? Lastly, I saw that ZFS supports exporting via NFS -- my home environment is mixed, so is ZFS able to export in Samba as well as NFS or do I need to configure the Samba server myself? That''s about all I''ve got for now. This message posted from opensolaris.org
Zeke wrote:> Hello all, > > I''ve been thinking about using an OpenSolaris fileserver for my home network. > There are several things which are important to me in this situation and I''d > like to know how ZFS handles them. I''ve been reading the ZFS Administration > Guide from Sun and I''ve looked over a few of the wiki pages available here and > on Sun''s site but I am still by no means an expert.Cool. I think there are a lot of people doing this now.> So, on to my questions.[nit: one question per line is much easier to respond to. I''ve tried to edit accordingly] For clarity, I''ll use "disk" to mean "LUN or slice"> First, does RaidZ support disks of multiple sizes, or must each RaidZ set > consist of equal sized disks?size doesn''t matter. But the available space will be limited by the smallest disk. You can always [zpool replace] a disk with a larger disk to grow over time.> Secondly, can you add disks to a RaidZ set after it''s been created and added > to the pool?You can [zpool add] another top-level vdev, but you cannot add another column to an existing raidz or raidz2 vdev. There is already an RFE. This question is asked every single day on this forum. Note: you can [zpool replace], [zpool attach], or [zpool detach] disks to mirrored vdevs to grow over time. See also http://www.baarf.com> Thirdly, for a relatively low usage pattern such as a home fileserver, is > 1GB > of RAM really necessary?Necessary? No. But you will be happier with more RAM.> Lastly, I saw that ZFS supports exporting via NFS -- my home environment is mixed, > so is ZFS able to export in Samba as well as NFS or do I need to configure the > Samba server myself? That''s about all I''ve got for now.The NFS and iSCSI shares can be builtin to ZFS. For Samba, it is not (yet?) builtin, but you can use Launch -> Administration -> Shared Folders to manage Samba shares. Or use the CLI for samba. -- richard
> First, does RaidZ support disks of multiple sizes, or must each RaidZ set > consist of equal sized disks?Each RAID-Z set must be constructed from equal-sized storage. While it''s possible to mix disks of different sizes, either you lose the capacity of the larger disks, or you have to partition them and then use equal-sized partitions as the basis for each RAID-Z set.> Secondly, can you add disks to a RaidZ set after it''s been created and > added to the pool?No. You can add a new RAID-Z set to the pool, but you can''t add an individual disk to an existing RAID-Z set.> Thirdly, for a relatively low usage pattern such as a home fileserver, is > 1GB of > RAM really necessary?"It might be." You can give it a try with less, but ZFS really likes to have a lot of RAM for caching. (And memory can be relatively cheap these days, at least for modern low-end/mid-range hardware.)> Lastly, I saw that ZFS supports exporting via NFS -- my home environment is > mixed, so is ZFS able to export in Samba as well as NFS or do I need to configure > the Samba server myself?You need to configure the Samba server yourself for now. (Hmmm, maybe there''s an RFE? :-) This message posted from opensolaris.org