First try: I gave up; import is so slow...

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zamana

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Hi everybody.

Well, after using a “deskserver” (I mean… a “desktop” computer hardware used as if it was a “server”) for almost 6 years, I recently bought what I considered a “super server” hardware:

Motherboard: Supermicro X11SSL-CF
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1245-v5
Memory: 32GB (2x16) Crucial ECC

The old server was an Ubuntu 16.04 (it started as a 12.04 and was upgraded, version by version, along the years, with no issues), and my storage was ZFS (on Linux).

Before turn off my old server, to backup my data (almost 11TB) took me almost 3 days, with some interruptions between each copies, all of them to external USB 3.0 HDDs.

Then I installed Freenas on the new server. But after 3 days, with no interruptions, Freenas had only restored (or imported, as you say) 1.6TB of data from the ext4 filesystems of the external HDDs. Then I gave up and installed an Ubuntu 18.04, rebuild my ZFS pool and restored the data in less than 2 days.

I would like to give Freenas another chance, on the new server. So I would like to hear from more experienced users what do you suggest to make this new attempt and have my data restored in the least time as possible.

One idea (or at least the start of it): I still have my old “deskserver” where I can install a "temporary" FreeNas, and I still have some old internal HDDs where I can build another ZFS pool and then backup my current data (still the same 11TB). For example, I could sync my data from the current Ubuntu to the temporary Freenas along several days (I can wait this, as long as I can use my data), and then install FreeNas again in the new server and restore back, this time from the temporary Freenas on the "deskserver" to the final Freenas on the new server.

Do you think that this last restore would be... quick? Or at least faster than the ext4 import that never ends?

Do you have any other and possibly better idea?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.
Regards.
 

Chris Moore

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I would like to give Freenas another chance, on the new server. So I would like to hear from more experienced users what do you suggest to make this new attempt and have my data restored in the least time as possible.
Don't use ext4. FreeNAS doesn't really support it and I am not sure how you made that work. Just make the external drives ZFS single disk pool.
OR
What I did last time I moved from one server to another, connect the pool from the old server to the hardware of the new server so that you have two pools attached to a single system board and simply copy the data from one pool to the other.
That is kind of dependent on exactly what hardware you have in the old system and the details of how you have the new system configured.
More details would be great.
 

zamana

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Hi!

Thanks for reply!

Don't use ext4. FreeNAS doesn't really support it and I am not sure how you made that work.

I use it because I made the backups of the ZoL on them.

Freenas kind of "supported" it through the "import disk" feature.

Just make the external drives ZFS single disk pool.

Ok, but even this will need to be "imported" by the new Freenas server, anyway. Will this be quick? Or it will take weeks to import?

OR
What I did last time I moved from one server to another, connect the pool from the old server to the hardware of the new server so that you have two pools attached to a single system board and simply copy the data from one pool to the other (....).

Ok, but take into account that one of my current servers is an Ubuntu, and Freenas doesn't support the import of a ZoL pool transparently...

By the way, I guess that the hardware is irrelevant at this point. What I really need is a quick and fast way to migrate my data from Ubuntu ZoL to Freenas "volumes"...

Thanks.
Regards.
 

Chris Moore

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Will this be quick? Or it will take weeks to import?
With ZFS importing a pool, big or small, is virtually instantaneous and the copy should be much faster than it was using ext4.
Ok, but take into account that one of my current servers is an Ubuntu, and Freenas doesn't support the import of a ZoL pool transparently...
Why not? If it is feature flags 5000, ZFS is ZFS. I moved a pool from ZFS on Linux to FreeNAS and back more than once. The only thing that FreeNAS does that is different is create two partitions on the drives. First partition is 2GB and is for swap with the second partition being for ZFS and it creates the pool using the GPT partition labels.
my data from Ubuntu ZoL
It is just ZFS on Linux. Ubuntu has nothing to do with it.
By the way, I guess that the hardware is irrelevant at this point.
No, the hardware matters if you want to be able to do it quickly. If you, for example, have the old drives available, you can connect them to the FreeNAS server and import the pool. The problem is, you have already turned the new server into a Linux system and put data on it.
We can fix this, but it will take some work and part of the work is learning how FreeNAS works. You might want to read some of the primers. There are some good links under the button in my signature called "Useful Links"
 

silverback

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Using ZFS send receive I recently copied an 11 TB pool in about 8 hrs. Both pools were on the same machine. Hardware intensive I know.
 

zamana

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Using ZFS send receive I recently copied an 11 TB pool in about 8 hrs. Both pools were on the same machine. Hardware intensive I know.

This seems interesting. The new motherboard has 14 ports, from which I'm using 10 for the definitive ZFS pool, and one for the OS. In order to backup my 11TB, I'll need to use my 4 old drives in "concatenation" (2x4TB + 2x2xTB) temporarily, what means one port missing.

So, is it possible to install Freenas on a USB stick and later move/migrate the installation to an SSD without losing the configuration? This way I could do what I'm planning and make the final restoration locally, what would be much more fast than by doing it through the network or by using Freenas importing mechanism.

What do you think?
 

Chris Moore

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from Ubuntu ZoL to Freenas "volumes"...
Don't get mixed up by the terminology they use in the GUI of FreeNAS. They did that the try and make it user friendly to people that don't understand ZFS. It is still a ZFS pool and ZFS is not operating system dependent, so there is no connection between Ubuntu and ZFS and ZoL is just the terminology for ZFS on Linux.
 

Chris Moore

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So, is it possible to install Freenas on a USB stick and later move/migrate the installation to an SSD without losing the configuration?
Yes. Easy. The configuration can be saved out to a backup file and easily imported again on another installation of FreeNAS.
Look at this page of the manual:
http://doc.freenas.org/11/system.html?highlight=backup#general
There is a button on the "General" tab called "Save Config" and it exports every configuration setting. Next to it is a button marked "Upload Config". You could do a clean installation of FreeNAS on new media, upload your config and be right back where you were before.
 

Chris Moore

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What do you think?
When I migrated a pool to a new chassis and disks last, a couple years ago, I had to temporarily connect two chassis together with SAS cables so that the disks from one chassis were wired to the system board in the other. The old pool was a 12 disk RAIDz3 with all 12 drives in a single vdev and I created the new pool as two vdevs of 6 drives each in RAIDz2. So I had all 24 drives connected to one system an both pools created and imported so I could copy direct from one to the other. Like @silverback said, it is a quicker way to go, but I had to run a box fan or two while it was going to ensure everything stayed cool with both of the chassis hanging open.
 

zamana

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Don't get mixed up by the terminology they use in the GUI of FreeNAS. They did that the try and make it user friendly to people that don't understand ZFS. It is still a ZFS pool and ZFS is not operating system dependent, so there is no connection between Ubuntu and ZFS and ZoL is just the terminology for ZFS on Linux.

Ok. Got it.
 

Ericloewe

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I am glad to be able to say that the next major release of FreeNAS will almost certainly have eradicated the word "volume" whenever the word "pool" is correct.
 

zamana

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(...)
Why not? If it is feature flags 5000, ZFS is ZFS. I moved a pool from ZFS on Linux to FreeNAS and back more than once. The only thing that FreeNAS does that is different is create two partitions on the drives. First partition is 2GB and is for swap with the second partition being for ZFS and it creates the pool using the GPT partition labels.

Once my ZFS pool is already setup, disk based, this required 2GB partition is enough to make the whole process of using my current pool unfeasible. An import will be necessary. Is this correct or am I missing something?
 

Ericloewe

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The swap partitions aren't strictly required.

An import will be necessary.
Import disk wouldn't work with ZFS anyway, but you could zfs send | recv.
 
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pro lamer

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Remember that "import" in terms of zfs doesn't mean "copy", "upload"... rather it means "mount" or sth...

Sent from my mobile phone
 
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Chris Moore

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An import will be necessary.
I would get the new system all configured the way you want it with a freshly created pool that is ready to receive data.
Then you can power down the system, connect the disks from the Linux ZFS pool and bring the system back up. I don't anticipate that FreeNAS will auto import the foreign pool, but you can open a terminal window and issue a zpool import command and it should respond back with the name of any pool that is available to import. When you import the pool, it may be mounted at /poolname so you will probably want to change that by using zfs set mountpoint=/mnt/poolname which FreeNAS should also have the new pool mounted at /mnt/poolname.
If you were connected to the system by SSH, at that point, you could use midnight commander or even cp to copy files from one pool to the other. I used rsync when I did mine, but that was just as a precaution if the copy got interrupted, I wanted to be able to restart it without having to figure out what had been copied and what had not. There was no resumeable ZFS send / receive back then.
 

Chris Moore

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PS. The new pool and the old pool can't be named the same.
 
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