Now where do we go?

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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by ilovezfs » Thu May 30, 2013 5:31 am

monkeyfoahead wrote:I own a Mac Pro modified to accept 8 sata harddrives that I have in a single zpool. If Zevo bites the dust, will I be able to run some kind of VM solution from within OSX to access this zpool? Please pardon my ignorance.


Yes. If you want to continue using OS X on the Mac Pro, you can use VMware Fusion ($50) or Oracle's VirtualBox (free but less user friendly).
http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/overview.html

You have two choices on how to gain access to the drives from within the VM.

1. Option 1.
Buy a PCIe USB 3.0 express card (about $70) for the Mac Pro, as described here like this:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/allegrousb3pcie.html

Buy (about $60-$100) one or two USB 3.0 hubs so that you have at least 8 ports total:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1649#p4611

Buy eight USB 3.0 enclosures (3.5" or 2.5") depending on the size of the drives. (about $50 each) For example:
http://lifehacker.com/5955402/five-best ... enclosures

Use VMware's USB 3.0 "adapter" to directly connect the drives to a VM.

You will most likely want to use Linux for the operating system together with ZFS on Linux http://zfsonlinux.org
Other OS choices are Oracle Solaris 11, Free BSD, or some flavor of Illumos (formerly Open Solaris) such as Open Indiana or SmartOS.

I'm recommending Linux because I don't think VMware has proper USB 3.0 "adapters"/drivers for the other OSs.

2. Option 2.
Use "raw disk" vmdk files to map the drives to the VM. This will work as long as each of the drives is less than 2 terabytes. (It may have been upped to 3 terabytes recently, but I'm not sure). You create the raw disk vmdk files using the command line tool vmware-rawdiskCreator, which is included with VMware Fusion. Once VMware Fusion is installed, the command line tool is located at this path:
/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/vmware-rawdiskCreator

(VirtualBox has an equivalent command line tool called VBoxManage which is located at /usr/bin/VBoxManage. Incidentally, the raw disk vmdk files created by VBoxManage can be used with VMware too.)

One tiny hurdle is that VMware Fusion does not let you create raw disk vmdks through the GUI. You have to add them either by directly editing the vmx configuration file or by using a simple trick. You create a virtual hard disk vmdk via VMware Fusion's GUI. And then simply replace the virtual hard disk vmdk file the GUI created with the raw disk vmdk file you created using vware-rawdiskCreator. If the raw disk vmdk file has the same file name as the virtual disk vmdk created through the GUI, VMware will happily use the raw disk vmdk file. This trick just lets you avoid having to deal with editing the vmx file by hand.

You will create one raw disk vmdk file for each of your physical drives and the virtual machine should be able to access them fine.

Usually the purpose of the raw disk vmdk feature is to make it possible for VMware Fusion to boot a physical Boot Camp partition as a virtual machine. That's why they make it difficult to manipulate raw disk vmdks via the GUI. The GUI has features which are inapporpriate for raw disks (such as resizing). Nonetheless, the non-Boot-Camp raw disk vmdks work just fine if you use the command line tool vware-rawdiskCreator.

Option 2 should work with any of the guest OSs I mentioned above because there is no need for the guest OS to have any particular driver nor for VMware to have any particular VM adpater compatible with the guest OS.

Of the two options, option 1 USB 3.0 or option 2 raw disk vmdks, option 1 USB 3.0 will likely give you better performance because VMware is actually able to pass the drive through to the virtual machine directly and use a proper VM adapter. Option 2 is cheaper but will probably have worse performance because the drive is not actually passed through but merely mapped via the raw disk vmdk file. Also, option 2 is a bit more advanced because you have to use the command line tool to create the raw disk vmdks.
____
Now, if the Mac Pro is not your primary computer, you could repurpose it as a VMware ESXi 5.1 server http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=2032756
Mac Pros are officially supported hardware for ESXi server http://www.vmware.com/resources/compati ... search.php

Given that you have SATA drives directly attached, ESXi server would be a very powerful approach. (It's also free.) You would connect the Mac Pro to your primary computer via Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE if you can afford it) and access the ESXi server's virtual machines from your primary computer. The ESXi server could run Oracle Solaris 11, Linux, etc. You are even allowed to run OS X on the ESXi server because a Mac Pro is Apple hardware. The reason the Mac Pro would not be your primary machine is that the ESXi server cannot itself be a console for accessing the virtual machines that it is hosting. You have to access them from a console on a client computer, which would be your primary computer. Because ESXi runs on bare metal, the performance should be fantastic compared to VMware Fusion, which runs as software on top of OS X. Because your SATA drives are directly attached, you should be able to pass them through (paravirtualized) to the guest OSs if you want to keep your existing pool.

Your last option would be to install Linux directly on the Mac Pro, which should work great. Whether you could live with that as a primary machine is your judgment. At worst it could be a server. I doubt you will be able to install Oracle Solaris 11 or Open Indiana directly on the Mac Pro, but you never know. Also, FreeBSD may work on Mac Pros, but I'm not sure. Using ESXi server gets around these OS compatibility issues because the Mac Pro hardware is officially supported for ESXi, and then you put whatever ZFS capable OS on top of ESXi that you please.
Last edited by ilovezfs on Thu May 30, 2013 6:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by grahamperrin » Thu May 30, 2013 1:22 pm

monkeyfoahead wrote:… VM solution from within OSX to access this zpool? …


Yes; there's this under Contemplating ZFS plus probably a variety of other posts about using a virtual machine to work with ZFS.

For VM-based approaches that do not involve ZEVO, you're likely to find more discussion beyond this support forum than within the forum.
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Alternatives to ZEVO and to ZFS on Linux

Post by grahamperrin » Thu May 30, 2013 1:32 pm

ilovezfs wrote:… recommending Linux …


From what I see in IRC, occasionally, I have the impression that whilst there's much development around ZFS on Linux: it's not as reliable as some more mature implementations of ZFS.

Issues and milestones

Alternatives to ZEVO, and to ZFS on Linux, to be run in a virtual machine

I'd look first at FreeBSD or the like.
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Re: Alternatives to ZEVO and to ZFS on Linux

Post by ilovezfs » Thu May 30, 2013 4:06 pm

grahamperrin wrote:
ilovezfs wrote:… recommending Linux …

I was referring specifically to the case of USB 3.0 passthrough support in a virtual machine for an existing pool.

Beyond that specific use case, I'd head for Oracle Solaris 11.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by monkeyfoahead » Thu May 30, 2013 7:37 pm

Thanks for the excellent solutions
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by ilovezfs » Thu May 30, 2013 10:48 pm

monkeyfoahead wrote:Thanks for the excellent solutions

You're welcome. Let me know if you have any questions about the solutions.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by lundman » Sat Jun 01, 2013 3:59 am

Now with Don pretty much out of the picture for Greenbytes,

Do we have any more information on this, I take it there has been something changed?

Now, I have been working on osx.zfs on github, and we are making great progress. I would like to think the core is pretty good and solid. It is missing some outer area support, like snapshot directories. But have some newer features like pool 5000 and zvols.

I am hoping to do a binary test release soon, and we are doing benchmarking (iozone/bonnie) on VMs. Those that don't mind compiling could try it, but probably better in a VM.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by monkeyfoahead » Sat Jun 01, 2013 7:06 pm

How long until Zevo volumes can be imported you think?
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Orientation

Post by grahamperrin » Sun Jun 02, 2013 4:09 am

monkeyfoahead wrote:How long until Zevo volumes can be imported you think?


For questions about development of MacZFS, please aim for the lists and other resources in the MacZFS area.
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Re: Now where do we go?

Post by ilovezfs » Sun Jun 02, 2013 4:27 am

monkeyfoahead wrote:How long until Zevo volumes can be imported you think?

File-based pools from ZEVO can already be imported by the dev version of MacZFS. They do not work with Finder at all: instant crash. The ZEVO Spotlight directories and files cause all sorts of problems. Expect to get lots of kernel panics. Changing file ownership (chown) does not work, so it is only barely usable if all files are owned by root, and you work from the Terminal as root or constantly use sudo. If an application launches an open-file/Finder window, you will get a kernel panic (since Finder doesn't work). An xterm seems to cause fewer kernel panics overall than Terminal.app. Based on what I see, it will be a long time before something like a raidz hard-drive based zpool from ZEVO can be imported by MacZFS.

My testing was done on OS X 10.8.3 without changing the ZEVO pool's pool version, so I have no idea how things might be different on OS X 10.8.2, or with the pool version chzanged to 5000, or both.
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