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!!