migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

All your general support questions for OpenZFS on OS X.

migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby abruzzi » Tue Sep 27, 2016 1:57 pm

Sorry my first post is a question (or several questions), but I'm planning an upgrade to my home SAN. For the past 4 or so years I have run Solaris on an old Sun workstation, and 5, 2tb SATA drives formed a single RAIDZ1 storage pool. It has run brilliantly, but recently the hardware has become less reliable (not the drives). A few weeks ago I got the first corrupted data, 32kb cleaned up by my monthly scrub, due to a spontaneous reboot.

At the same time I am planning to replace my desktop--a 10 year old MacPro1,1 that I have upgraded to 8 cores of 3ghz Xenons and lots of RAM. Normally it's limited to 10.7, but I have installed the hacks to run 10.11 (El Capitan). So my thought is to see if I can make this machine my new server. In addition since a significant chunk of my 8tb is movies and music that I have ripped from my very large collection, I have run VirtualBox on the Solaris machine to run windows and iTunes to act as a server to my AppleTV. Migrating to hosting ZFS on a Mac would mean I could skip the virtual machine, and run iTunes directly.

Unfortunately the Mac Pro has no way to host the 5 SATA drives, so I've been looking at 5 bay, all in one enclosures with JBOD mode. These seem to come in eSATA or USB3 versions, neither of which the Mac Pro has natively, meaning I'll have to buy a PCIe adapter. Below are some questions that I haven't found real clear answers on:

- The Solaris OS is pretty old and not updated, so presumably the version of ZFS on my pool is older than current OpenZFS. Will this cause any problems importing, or is this a simple import, followed by upgrade?

- It seems like CIFS/SMB/NFS on my Solaris box is implemented as part of the filesystem. Will those shares move with the export/import, or should I disable them and use the Mac OS level file sharing?

- I have a couple of iSCSI block devices in the pool. The only info I found on this is "it should work". Has anyone worked with iSCSI on the mac ZFS?

- I'm trying to determine whether I should use USB3 or eSATA. I'm guessing eSATA is less overhead, but it requires that my eSATA PCIe card is ok with port multipliers. I read somewhere that OSX requires 10.8.5 to support port multipliers, but I've also read some people complaining about port multipliers, and eSATA in general. Does anyone have any experience with SATA port multipliers on OSX? I've heard worse things about USB with ZFS, so I'm leaning towards eSATA. Is that generally the better option?

- As a single user, with at most two or three client apps (AppleTV streaming, desktop, laptop) and a 5 drive RAIDZ1, would 3gbps SATA be sufficient, or should I ensure that I get 6gbps? The drive interfaces are 6gbps, but they are fairly slow 5400rpm ECO drives.

- Finally, based on what I explained above, are there any gotchas, or should the drives easily be seen, USB or eSATA, and respond to an import?

If it helps, this is currently the hardware I'm looking at:

eSATA PCIe card:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet% ... ATA6PROE2/ - Sonnet specifically says this card supports port multipliers, but states that 10.8.5 is necessary.

USB3 PCIe:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet% ... /USB34PME/

Drive bay: There are two enclosures I'm considering. This:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product - This one supports both USB3 and eSATA, which would be nice for flexibility, but the eSATA is only 3gbps. Or this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product - This is eSATA only, but is capable of 6gbps.

The enclosures are kind of cheap--unfortunately--as I do not have a lot to spend on this project. I'm trying to make do without spending a lot.

Thanks, (and sorry for the wordiness.)
abruzzi
 
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby stumble » Tue Sep 27, 2016 4:03 pm

Unfortunately the Mac Pro has no way to host the 5 SATA drives


Are you sure? I thought it could take 4 SATA drives in cradles and you could replace the optical drive connector with a SATA one. I know some of the Mac Pro 1,1 optical drives are PATA, but my memory is that the motherboard will happily take SATA drives in the optical drive space, just by using the right cables.

That would be a very cheap solution. :-)
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby abruzzi » Tue Sep 27, 2016 4:33 pm

Good question. I thought the optical drives are PATA, but I can check. I'd need to use both bays, one for the boot disk, 3 cradles plus 2 optical for the RAIDZ1. I'd have to find a sled to mount the 3.5 drives in the 5.25 bays. I was also hoping to use one of the cradles for an SSD for a ZFS L2ARC cache drive. So it might not be a long term solution.
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby Brendon » Tue Sep 27, 2016 5:49 pm

This will be a very power hungry NAS! Maybe you could find a 2nd hand mac mini with thunderbolt, and use a tbolt enclosure? Having said that I effectively use my Trashcan MacPro as a NAS (using a tbolt enclosure for the drives).

I don't think 1.5.2 supports the Solaris semantics of shared datasets, but the code in the repository sure does - it supports NFS, SMB and maybe AFP.

- Brendon
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby abruzzi » Tue Sep 27, 2016 6:01 pm

Brendon wrote:This will be a very power hungry NAS! Maybe you could find a 2nd hand mac mini with thunderbolt, and use a tbolt enclosure? Having said that I effectively use my Trashcan MacPro as a NAS (using a tbolt enclosure for the drives).

- Brendon


Believe it or not, the existing NAS is no better. Its a Sun Ultra40 M2, and it doesn't have sleep mode, and is pretty much full on 24x7.

EDIT: This machine:

Image
abruzzi
 
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby Brendon » Tue Sep 27, 2016 6:30 pm

Wow! Yes, I see.

Can give you a 2500 if you want!

Brendon
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby stumble » Wed Sep 28, 2016 12:15 am

abruzzi wrote:Good question. I thought the optical drives are PATA, but I can check.


In mine, the optical drive is PATA but I've read that I can put SATA disks in the optical space anyway: just need the right cables to attach them to the motherboard. I'm afraid I can't remember where I read that. Sorry!

Also, if it's going to be on all the time anyway you could save a drive slot by starting up from a USB stick. (If it's not going to be on all the time then you might not want the extra startup time.)
stumble
 
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby abruzzi » Wed Sep 28, 2016 8:45 am

stumble wrote:
abruzzi wrote:Good question. I thought the optical drives are PATA, but I can check.


In mine, the optical drive is PATA but I've read that I can put SATA disks in the optical space anyway: just need the right cables to attach them to the motherboard. I'm afraid I can't remember where I read that. Sorry!

Also, if it's going to be on all the time anyway you could save a drive slot by starting up from a USB stick. (If it's not going to be on all the time then you might not want the extra startup time.)


Interesting. A little google led me to this:

https://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/ ... nstall.pdf

Apparently there are two unused SATA ports on the motherboard. So one caddy for a boot drive, three for the first three drives of the RAIDZ1, and the other two off the motherboard ports, could get me up and running for less than $50 for brackets, cables, etc.

I haven't been able to find out if the motherboard ports are the same performance and the caddy ports, but I'll assume it doesn't really matter (especially given that the eSATA setup I was looking at put 5 drives on a single port.) The only things I don't like is the drives in the optical bays wont be as accessible in the event of failure. (and getting to those motherboard ports is going to give me PTSD. I remember swapping the CPU a few years ago and it was a bit harrowing.)

Nonetheless, I'm still curious about people's input on the other questions I brought up. Especially if I want to add a second pool down the road.
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby stumble » Wed Sep 28, 2016 2:19 pm

OMG, that installation looks horrendous. I was thinking of doing it, mainly for fun, but I hadn't seen the details. Now that I know, I'd rather install a SATA drive in my left kidney than in the optical bay of an old Mac Pro.
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Re: migrating from Solaris to OpenZFS on OSX

Postby Brendon » Wed Sep 28, 2016 8:33 pm

Not sure you are going to get much in the way of concrete recommendations. I have seen plenty of people try to make setups go and they often seem to have some hardware problem or another. Maybe its only people that have problems that post, who knows. The impression I have is that our most common users have mac-minis and run USB 3 drives off them.

I do have an old pro at home, it used to run ZFS (quite well) until I gave it to my son. It boots off a PCIe card hosting a standard SSD. The 4HDD bays were used for ZFS. If I wanted more storage I would have just brought bigger drives.

While I don't really like the current thunderbolt macs (hate having external boxes and power supplies everywhere) at least that interface is trivially expandable, just add $$$$.

- Brendon
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