RAIDZ expansion, it's happening ... someday!

[danb35]

BSD based TrueNAS gradually becoming an afterthought that will eventually be discontinued?

Hardly the first; there have been plenty of others. But I'm not sure this counts; OpenZFS is now based on Linux, so that's where the work would be even if it does get moved to FreeBSD.

 

[jgreco]

“Lazy” brings unneeded pejorative opinion into a technical discussion. Another way to see this is as a now unnecessary rigidity, as is the need to manually rebalance after expansion.

[mod hat on:] For the purposes of explaining a valid point of view into this discussion, "lazy" is not a pejorative, at least in this case. Where possible and practical, please try to read things for meaning rather than trying to find a way to take offense. This community is large, many people come from varying language backgrounds, and people are here to constructively assist other community members, spending some of their time in the process. Mod team will be happy to steer discussions in such a direction if things go off the rails.

 

[Ericloewe]

"Lazy" is a computing term for delaying things until convenient or absolutely necessary (e.g. Lazy evaluation of an expression in some programming environments), so it should not be seen as particularly offensive.

 

[Whattteva]

So is this the first sign of what I predicted when Scale was announced—BSD based TrueNAS gradually becoming an afterthought that will eventually be discontinued?

I hope not. I hate Linux for servers. The day TrueNAS CORE gets abandoned is the day I stop using it and start running vanilla FreeBSD, which I already do for some services anyway (ie. Jellyfin, Apache, Transmission, Nextcloud).

 

[Yorick]

So is this the first sign of what I predicted when Scale was announced—BSD based TrueNAS gradually becoming an afterthought that will eventually be discontinued?

Not at all. BSD-based TrueNAS Core is the "core" feature release. Storage-centric, no feature experimentation, and ZFS features come in from upstream rather being fed into upstream.

SCALE is the more aggressive, converged compute and storage, feature-forward version. Here ZFS features may land before upstream has them, then they are fed back upstream.

So the cadence might look something like:

SCALE does raidz expansion
Upstream adopts it
FreeBSD pulls it from upstream in a new release
Core adopts it

Maybe 2 years after SCALE does it first, optimistically?

It's a choose your adventure thing. Solid, proven storage tech: Core. Converged compute and storage plus feature experimentation: SCALE.

 

[MvL72]

Noticed this feature is coming to ZFS (cool), but can someone inform me if there is any update? When will this be part of TrueNas?

 

[danb35]

When will this be part of TrueNas?

If you'd read this thread, you'd have a partial answer, but the only real answer is, "when it's ready, and probably sooner in SCALE than in CORE." At this point, I'd bet we don't see it in SCALE for at least another year.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Noticed this feature is coming to ZFS (cool), but can someone inform me if there is any update? When will this be part of TrueNas?

Don't hold your breath. The feature was promoted to an alpha preview on June 11, 2021, and has been undergoing testing since. It's not ready for beta yet.

RAIDZ Expansion feature by ahrens · Pull Request #12225 · openzfs/zfs

Motivation and Context This feature allows disks to be added one at a time to a RAID-Z group, expanding its capacity incrementally. This feature is especially useful for small pools (typically wit...

github.com

 

[Davvo]

I guess before the '30s is a valid prediction.

 

[winnielinnie]

Noticed this feature is coming to ZFS (cool), but can someone inform me if there is any update? When will this be part of TrueNas?

According to Phoronix and Ars Technica, RAIDZ expansion will be available in the next iteration (version 2.2.0) of OpenZFS development, for both Linux and FreeBSD systems!

This means we'll likely see it implemented in TrueNAS Core 13.0-U6 (or U5.1?) and SCALE 23.x sometime in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Phoronix news report: ZFS 2.2 planned features and future development

Ars Technica article: Matthew Ahrens OpenZFS 2023 announcement, developers summit

 

[Davvo]

This means we'll likely see it implemented in TrueNAS Core 13.0-U6 (or U5.1?) and SCALE 23.x sometime in the fourth quarter of 2023.

I believe we are more likely to find it in the next iteration of TN CORE (14) since imho it's going to get tested by iX Systems in SCALE first.

 

[danb35]

Someone likes his April Fools jokes.

 

[Ericloewe]

Let me go and get the banhammer, some jokes are too cruel to be forgiven.

 

[Etorix]

I guess before the '30s is a valid prediction.

…as long as you don't fill in the century.

 

[MvL72]

Thanks guys for the replies!

 

[engessa]

I think i have been waiting sinds 2018 so i can wait a little longer. Being able to shove an extra disc in my server when i run out of storage without moving everything around on multiple sets of hard drives is most welcome.

 

[Whattteva]

I wouldn't hold your breath for it. Things like this would have to be tested extremely extensively cause no one wants the wonderful Christmas present of file corruptions in exchange for being able to add a drive dynamically.

I took this into account and never counted on it going live anytime soon, so I built my array as striped mirrors, which, to me, provides the best balance between upgrade/expansion flexibility and performance.

On another note, I would be fine if iXsystems decides to guinea-pig it in SCALE cause I have no need nor any interest in ever using SCALE for production use.

 

[Yorick]

Last openzfs leadership call had a brief segment on this: ixSystems are sponsoring work to bring raidz expansion over the finish line. The person working on it has rebased the code, and is working on fixing issues in the test suite.

By 2024 it ships? This may actually happen.

 

[Davvo]

Posted some details on that recently:

https://twitter.com/kmooresays/status/1673792749672210434

Good news is, its coming, but I don't see it in TrueNAS until April '24 at soonest, not going to get merged into Cobia, has to lands in OpenZFS upstream first.

 

[asap2go]

Really happy that it's coming at all though :)