VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by ilovezfs » Mon Jun 24, 2013 10:51 am

monkeyfoahead wrote:ilovezfs, you are a gentleman and a scholar. I am very impressed with your knowledge. This is the path I think I will pursue. Out of curiosity, why did you not use this as a solution? What is your contingency plan?

No problem, monkeyfoahead. I'm happy to help. Let me know if you need more help getting it working. Have you decided what OS you're going to run in the VM?

I have not fully decided on what I want to do. I have high hopes for MacZFS's prototype generation (AKA zfs-osx/experimental/beta/alpha) http://maczfs.org, which is a port of ZFSonLinux (produced at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), which is itself downstream from Illumos, which is the fork of Open Solaris after Oracle took Solaris closed source. The developers are making great progress and to say they are "super competent" is a total understatement. Theoretically, ZEVO pools should be safely importable once the code matures. I suspect this may be possible even before Mavericks is out. Even if for some reason ZEVO pools end up not 100% compatible, it would be worth it to start over with a fresh pool if that is necessary. And of course, by the time Mavericks is out ZEVO might be sold and upgraded for Mavericks.

Alternatively, I am considering buying or building a server, and connecting to it with either Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The server could run Oracle Solaris 11, Open Indiana, FreeBSD, or Linux. If Linux, I might opt for Btrfs instead of ZFS since Btrfs is part of the Linux kernel, GPL, no compatibility layer to be maintained, more mainstream, etc.

The primary reason I am shying away from the VMware Fusion solution is because my main computer is a MacBook Pro and VMware loves to eat my battery. I'd prefer not to have the power cord plugged in all the time.

By the way, if you do decide you like using VMware, you might even want to consider transitioning to using all virtual disks for your pool instead of raw device maps to make things simpler.
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Post by grahamperrin » Mon Jun 24, 2013 12:35 pm

ilovezfs wrote:… if for some reason ZEVO pools end up not 100% compatible …


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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by monkeyfoahead » Mon Jun 24, 2013 12:45 pm

Wow, well I had no idea that mac-zfs development was moving so rapidly. I won't be migrating for a while, due to my desire to wait until mavericks is at least 6 months old for them to get the bugs out, also i make extensive use of macports.So perhaps, by that time, I will be able to just move my pool over to mac-zfs. That'd be ideal. Or maybe Ill get lucky and somebody will buy Zevo haha
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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by ilovezfs » Mon Jun 24, 2013 1:04 pm

monkeyfoahead wrote:Wow, well I had no idea that mac-zfs development was moving so rapidly. I won't be migrating for a while, due to my desire to wait until mavericks is at least 6 months old for them to get the bugs out, also i make extensive use of macports.So perhaps, by that time, I will be able to just move my pool over to mac-zfs. That'd be ideal. Or maybe Ill get lucky and somebody will buy Zevo haha

Six months! That's crazy talk. I upgrade the minute the new OS is out. Bugs be damned.

MacPorts! Use Homebrew and it will compile everything fresh for Mavericks.
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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by monkeyfoahead » Mon Jun 24, 2013 4:45 pm

ilovezfs wrote:
monkeyfoahead wrote:Wow, well I had no idea that mac-zfs development was moving so rapidly. I won't be migrating for a while, due to my desire to wait until mavericks is at least 6 months old for them to get the bugs out, also i make extensive use of macports.So perhaps, by that time, I will be able to just move my pool over to mac-zfs. That'd be ideal. Or maybe Ill get lucky and somebody will buy Zevo haha

Six months! That's crazy talk. I upgrade the minute the new OS is out. Bugs be damned.

MacPorts! Use Homebrew and it will compile everything fresh for Mavericks.


Haha well FreeBSD is my sever operating system of choice. Hence my affinity for MacPorts. I experienced some unpleasantness during my 10.6.x to 10.7 upgrade that has left me inclined to wait a while before updates ha. :)
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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by ilovezfs » Mon Jun 24, 2013 10:45 pm

monkeyfoahead wrote:
ilovezfs wrote:
monkeyfoahead wrote:Wow, well I had no idea that mac-zfs development was moving so rapidly. I won't be migrating for a while, due to my desire to wait until mavericks is at least 6 months old for them to get the bugs out, also i make extensive use of macports.So perhaps, by that time, I will be able to just move my pool over to mac-zfs. That'd be ideal. Or maybe Ill get lucky and somebody will buy Zevo haha

Six months! That's crazy talk. I upgrade the minute the new OS is out. Bugs be damned.

MacPorts! Use Homebrew and it will compile everything fresh for Mavericks.


Haha well FreeBSD is my sever operating system of choice. Hence my affinity for MacPorts. I experienced some unpleasantness during my 10.6.x to 10.7 upgrade that has left me inclined to wait a while before updates ha. :)

I think you'll find you may prefer Homebrew if you try it.
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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by scasady » Tue Jun 25, 2013 9:37 am

I had one other issue with vmware which made me give up one it. I was using raw disks with zfs on Open Indiana and upgraded vmware to version 5. Rebooting the virtual machine wiped some of the labels on the zfs disks ! Apparently vmware changed the definition of full disk / partitions which changed disk size. I lost one whole disk and had to dd new labels on some others. This was an 8 disk raidz2 so I recovered the pool with no losses but I was in a more or less panic for a day or two. This was a while ago so I have forgotten all the details and I am guessing that I could have avoided the problem if I had been more cautious with the upgrade. However the dependencies on the interaction between OS X and vmware and possible changes with new versions made me decide the system was just too fragile.
It did work fine though until then.
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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by monkeyfoahead » Tue Jun 25, 2013 10:09 am

scasady wrote:I had one other issue with vmware which made me give up one it. I was using raw disks with zfs on Open Indiana and upgraded vmware to version 5. Rebooting the virtual machine wiped some of the labels on the zfs disks ! Apparently vmware changed the definition of full disk / partitions which changed disk size. I lost one whole disk and had to dd new labels on some others. This was an 8 disk raidz2 so I recovered the pool with no losses but I was in a more or less panic for a day or two. This was a while ago so I have forgotten all the details and I am guessing that I could have avoided the problem if I had been more cautious with the upgrade. However the dependencies on the interaction between OS X and vmware and possible changes with new versions made me decide the system was just too fragile.
It did work fine though until then.

Jeez, this story alone is enough to deter me from using vmware. Maybe I'll just wait and hope I can convert it to mac-zfs. I'm in no hurry to upgrade to mavericks. I suppose I can just keep using what I have for a few years more.
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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by monkeyfoahead » Tue Jun 25, 2013 11:40 am

monkeyfoahead wrote:
scasady wrote:I had one other issue with vmware which made me give up one it. I was using raw disks with zfs on Open Indiana and upgraded vmware to version 5. Rebooting the virtual machine wiped some of the labels on the zfs disks ! Apparently vmware changed the definition of full disk / partitions which changed disk size. I lost one whole disk and had to dd new labels on some others. This was an 8 disk raidz2 so I recovered the pool with no losses but I was in a more or less panic for a day or two. This was a while ago so I have forgotten all the details and I am guessing that I could have avoided the problem if I had been more cautious with the upgrade. However the dependencies on the interaction between OS X and vmware and possible changes with new versions made me decide the system was just too fragile.
It did work fine though until then.

Jeez, this story alone is enough to deter me from using vmware. Maybe I'll just wait and hope I can convert it to mac-zfs. I'm in no hurry to upgrade to mavericks. I suppose I can just keep using what I have for a few years more.


Another thought I just had: Why not just dual boot lion and mavericks? I'll just only boot into mavericks when I need features that it supplies over lion (see opengl 4.1). That should buy me several years for this zfs business to sort itself out.
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Re: VMware Fusion Zevo contingency plan

Post by scasady » Tue Jun 25, 2013 5:42 pm

To be clear, I still use vmware to run windows and think it is great for that. I just don't use the raw disks thing.
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