Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!

[KTrain]

Thanks for taking the time to put this together. EXTREMELY helpful.

 

[cyberjock]

Glad it helped! 9.2.0 update should be coming in the next few days. Just so busy with the Christmas season I haven't gotten time to update it.

 

[dztrbd]

Hi cyber jock. Just finished reading your presentation and it was fantastic. The little pics and animations make it as clear as it can possibly be. Absolutely amazing work mate. Keep it up as its much appreciated. Now where are ya so I can buy you a beer.

Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

 

[cyberjock]

I'm in Illinois. :)

Glad it helped you out! Good luck with FreeNAS.

 

[scurrier]

Another thanks for posting this. It gave me some confidence to have about 90% of it be things I already knew, but it was presented very clearly and there were a few things in there that I didn't know. Thanks again!

 

[cyberjock]

Updated to 9.2.0.

Some useful tidbits added.

 

[Rand]

Thx for the read:)

And you did'nt update the last slide, its still pointing to 9.1.1 (unless thats intentional:))

 

[cyberjock]

Whoops.. I'll go fix that!

 

[Joe4evr]

Thanks a lot for this slideshow. I learned a lot from it and together with the hardware suggestions thread, it really made me reconsider what I want to build for a NAS. I guess I'll hold off for now and rather move my pfSense installation to a low power consumption build first.

I still have a few questions, though. First, how are hot spare drives handled, if at all? I presume they should be part of the vdev from the get go, but are they then "invisible" until needed? Or do they count towards the amount of recommended RAM?

Second, you specifically warned against running SMART tests while a Scrub is taking place, but does regular reading/writing of data during a Scrub pose any threat to data integrity? I'm guessing no, but it's something I wouldn't want to let up to chance.

Thanks in advance.

 

[cyberjock]

Hot spares aren't "handled" at all. It's a FreeBSD limitation(no ETA on when this will work). You must manually put the spares online. Because of this, I don't recommend you use the spares feature(but you are welcome to have the drives installed and spinning if you desire).

Scrubs and SMART tests are fine to be performed while using the pool. The issue is with very high I/O scenarios as both Scrubs and SMART long tests compete for resources. Both SMART long tests and Scrubs will take longer depending on your loading, but if you don't mind that drawback its completely safe. Otherwise it's just like my presentation says... don't do SMART long tests and Scrubs at the same time.

 

[no_connection]

You mention the 2^n +1 2 or 3 depending on RAID level for performance by keeping within sector boundaries.
Does it hurt performance when going from a 6 disk Z2 to 8 disk Z2 or does the extra spindles compensate?
Does using Z3 instead of Z2 increase performance with the extra spindle added or would it stay the same?

Excellent presentation btw.

 

[cyberjock]

There's no solid answer for you in the "hurt performance" or "help performance" arena. Things aren't so cut and dry if you start asking deep questions(like you are). Going from 6 drive(optimal) to 8 drive(non-optimal) isn't an easy answer. Normally, optimal is better if you want performance. More VDevs also increases performance. But, going from a Z2 to Z3 generally always hurts performance.

But, the big picture depends on what your bottleneck is. As long as your pool is fast enough to saturate your network connection, who cares? There are exceptions though. Like for when you are doing low bandwidth but high I/O setups. But that's beyond the scope of my presentation.

 

[jerryjharrison]

I just wanted to say thanks. I have been playing with Freenas (2 servers replicating across the internet) and I learned a ton. VERY much appreciated.

 

[UdjinPr]

Hello, I have issues with correct work of media plugins miniDLNA and Plex.
miniDLNA doesn't find new files. He does it only after restart. I have read, that there isn't solutions to fix it.

Plex doesn't work correctly. It misses some files.

There is serviio, but it is installed too complicated. Anybody know serviio does work correctly?

 

[cyberjock]

UdjinPr: Your question is unrelated to this thread.

 

[kiwijase]

Hello,
Firstly thank-you for the great overview!
I have 2 questions that hopefully haven't been already covered:
1) How often should I run SMART Short and/or Long Tests? (on consumer or WD RED drives)
2) You mention about only using 1-2GB of an SSD drive for ZIL for wear-leveling - Does adding a drive as a ZIL through the GUI do this, or should I manually slice the drive and add via CLI? (I am using NFS with ProxMox KVMs and definitely see an improvement with a ZIL)

Thanks

 

[locutis]

Wow thank you. Awesome job.

 

[basebird]

Thank you for the slides, cyberjock!! Your continued effort to keep them up-to-date is very much appreciated!

Also, I think I found a typo. On the very first page it says:
"This presentation was last updated January 8, 2014 to somewhat coincide with the release of FreeNAS 9.2.0"

However, on the very last page it says:
"This presentation is accurate as of FreeNAS-9.2.0 RELEASE (January 8, 2013)."

I guess, the date should be "January 8, 2014" on the latter as well.

Thanks again!

 

[cyberjock]

Thank you for the slides, cyberjock!! Your continued effort to keep them up-to-date is very much appreciated!

Also, I think I found a typo. On the very first page it says:
"This presentation was last updated January 8, 2014 to somewhat coincide with the release of FreeNAS 9.2.0"

However, on the very last page it says:
"This presentation is accurate as of FreeNAS-9.2.0 RELEASE (January 8, 2013)."

I guess, the date should be "January 8, 2014" on the latter as well.

Thanks again!

Yeah, I'll be fixing that with the next release.

 

[ECCfrenaslover]

Great work! Your guide made a few things clearer than the current documentation.