pool compatibility / new system architecture HELP requested

[macz]

Thanks in advance for keeping the mac openzfs project rolling!!!

I have a server that is getting way long in the tooth.. its been running this pool for over 5 years on a GA-EP45 motherboard and the pool started off using apples (not google zfs or other fork) 10.6 beta zfs bits... and now the server is running 10.11 and upgraded to openzfs like 1.4.5 I think.. and that is far as this pool can go without a complete zpool destroy/create. The pool can no longer upgrade as it hangs and I have tried to eradicate the ACLs that OS X server 10.6 populated the datasets with but not completely successful so those issues persist.

So if I am going to tear down 9TB of storage + another 10TB of backup pool, I figured I would upgrade hardware at the same time.

I have purchased a dual cpu L5640 with 48gb ram S5520HC based server and now I am deciding between

A: Running OS X server native and loading the apps like plex server, secruityspy (sec camera server), ownlcoud ect native with O3X like I have been doing

B: Running a ESXI 6 box with NAPP-IT one all in one server with NAPP-IT providing VM storage as well as data. I have this running as a testbed right now, ESXI booting via thumdrive and ESXI 'hacked' to boot NAPP-IT from a internal USB 2.5 hard disk thus allowing me to pass the entire ICH and LSI card to NAPP-IT for ZFS. Possibly using containers in ESXI photon or containers in proxmox etc to run services like plex server, own cloud, zone minder, etc vs running them all in OS X

ZFS use to be pretty portable between hardware as the original thoughts were that a storage pool should be hardware agnostic but since 5000 opened feature flags.. how true is that today? MY QUESTION to not trying to get long winded.. is how compatible would a pools made with napp-it/omnios, freenas etc be with O3X? If I decided to build the new pools with napp-it and decided to abandon ESXI and just run OS X native, could I still use the pools or would I have to do a destroy/create.. and if so.. how could i use my backups since they too would likely be in the wrong 'format'? Would forcing a lower pool version make it more compatible? although losing the lz4 compression etc is not desirable.

So where to go from here. I would like to have a robust deployment moving forward. I would like to have OS X server be able to do a little better with file shares like the old days (ACL/Multiple users per share) and I understand that issue 116 is potentially solved? O3X in many ways provides some feature flags tailored to OS X so in the end would running native be better? Another issue is the lack of driver support in OS X for enterprise HBA cards, 10G networking etc that would be easier with ESXI as the front end? For example the LSI 9212-4e4i in IT mode is not supported in OS X but am using a Astek kext driver that has limitations (dont know what the limits are yet) ... if I flashed it with raid bios there are some hacked drivers but that is not optimal for ZFS as it would require passing the drives as single disk raids. however it works fine in ESXI and napp-it has drivers for the pass through. also, napp-it had some other nice tools that I probably dont need right now but it there, comstar/iscsi, and if I installed a multiport 10g card, can act as a cheap 10g switch between a couple machines...

Freenas has a great gui, is now ok to virtualize, but I dont like the way it forces to partition drives and keeps swap on them. not easy to get around from what I hear even if you create a pool from the command line, replacing a drive or anything from the gui would screw things up.

Any thoughts from the community would be appreciated!!

[macz]

ok found the limitations of the Astek driver without a registration key (that they no longer sell)... ONE DRIVE... so I need to find a HBA that is mac compatible or just bite the bullet and run ESXI/NAPP-IT and OS X as a machine....

ugh...

[macz]

anyone.. beuler.. beuler.. ?

is this mic on.....

[macz]

still no thoughts?

[tangles]

rocketraid 2744.

it runs fine on plenty of platforms including OSX.

given u sat on an ancient build of ZFS for OSX for ages, it sounds like u don't mix things up all that often either, so stick with what u know...

[macz]

thanks for the rocketraid advice.. I used one of their cards years ago and got a bad taste in my mouth.. horible customer support and they just dont feel like high quality gear.. hence I went with lsi this time


I am pretty much convinced that I need to stick to an ESXI system at this point and am having the following issues

ESXI booting off thumb drive... check.. working fine.. as its meant to

Napp-it booting off a usb harddrvie internal header after modding ESXI.. pretty much check.. every now and then a cold boot wont pick it up..

passing the LSI and the ICH10 ports to ESXI.. check.. no issues

Using ZFS dataset for VMstorage over NFS... working.. but writes are HORRIBLE like 9MB/s yes.. 9... I have researched it and it looks like a sync write issue and that a SLOG shoud fix that as ALL ESXI writes to NFS are sync.. but setting sync=off on the dataset does not improve things.. still researching

SMB in Napp-it is up to 2.1 but I dont think its as fast as SMB3 as transferres from my osx machine to osx machine running openzfs over copper are FASTER than internal OSX SMB3 to a napp-it SMB2 dataset... so clearly OSX optimized SMB is better than Napp-it at the moment

Going virtual using OSX server is going to get interesting since it needs serveral things to be either on HFS+ or at least mimic it like OOX does here.. not available on Napp-it I would have to use iscsi for a zvol and then I would loose out on some file level features that I would have gotten if I just had OS X native with OOX... so that is going to suck