On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Matt Garman <matthew.garman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Anyone out there have a home (or maybe small office) file server > that where they thought about native Linux software RAID (mdadm) > versus ZFS on Linux? > I have a 4 x 1TB drive setup that was running CentOS 5 with mdadm and ext4 for the last 4 years. About 3 weeks ago I reinstalled with CentOS 6 and ZFS on Linux. One of the deciding factors was I wanted the previous version tab in Windows to function since I access the shares mainly from Windows systems. I've looked at LVM solutions in the past, but there were multiple drawbacks. The recent LVM thin provisioning addresses some of the issues, but it still was cumbersome and drawn out dealing with the various layers. I also looked at Solaris (OpenIndiana and OmniOS) and FreeBSD. Obviously ZFS on Solaris just works and the performance seemed good. However I'm not as familiar with Solaris and there isn't a large community following for support. FreeBSD had terrible performance out of the box accessing the Samba shares. I would see spikes where I would get 70% of gigabit and then drop to 30% and back again. FreeBSD seems to always require tweaking for performance, which seems unnecessary when Linux has good performance out of the box. Going back to CentOS 6 I followed the http://zfsonlinux.org/ directions and was up and running in minutes. Performance with Samba was great and the system has been rock solid. Accessing shares from Windows I can achieve 80-90% of gigabit. With ext4 I would see 90-100% utilization on a large copy, but the features are worth the small performance hit. I did turn compression on and atime off. I also set the recommended options for interoperability with Windows when creating the datasets. zfs set compress=on data zfs set atime=off data zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed -o nbmand=on data/share I am using the https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs-auto-snapshot script to create daily and weekly snapshots. You can disable snapshots per zfs dataset with zfs set com.sun:auto-snapshot=false data/share2 With CentOS 6.4 Samba 3.6.9 has support for the format option of the vfs shadow_copy2 module. I added the following to /etc/samba/smb.conf and the previous versions tab populated. unix extensions = no [share] path = /data/share wide links = yes vfs objects = shadow_copy2 shadow: snapdir = .zfs/snapshot shadow: format = zfs-auto-snap_daily-%Y-%m-%d-%H%M I added a cron.d job to weekly scrub the array like the raid-check script does. # Run system wide zfs scrub once a week on Sunday at 3am by default 0 3 * * Sun root /usr/local/sbin/zfs-scrub Contents of the /usr/local/sbin/zfs-scrub file. #!/bin/sh for pool in `/sbin/zpool list -H | cut -f 1` do /sbin/zpool scrub $pool done The only missing part is a script to check the zpool status command for errors and send an email alert. Ryan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
