[Colchester] Happy New Year Colchester LUG - ZFS VMs RAID XEON

[Wayland Sothcott]

The thing about ZFS (ProxMox and FreeNAS) is it hates RAID. You use a 
dumbed down RAID card called a Host Bus Adaptor (HBA) that simply 
presents the drives as just a bunch of drives.

ZFS, the billion dollar file system, is both the RAID, volume manager 
and file system. It's not as quick as a RAID card and XFS but then again 
it is if your CPU is powerful.

ZFS uses a very smart way of writing data, it does not overwrite it 
simply writes a new block and if successful unlinks the old block. If 
not successful then it's as if nothing was written. Nothing is part 
written. Copy On Write or COW.

The other thing is the volumes or DATASETS report the full size of your 
drive even if they are actually taking up a much smaller space. Ideal 
for VMs because you can give the VM a huge C: drive without wasting 
space. Yeah I know VHDs achieve this but this is the OS providing this 
feature so it's better. A snapshot is not a duplicate of the data but 
more of a book mark. Remember it does not overwrite with new data.

DDR3 ECC RAM is very cheap now, especially on AliExpress. Probably worth 
bumping that machine up top 64GB. Since you have so many memory channels 
the slow RAM is fine. I bet that machine can take an 8 core Xeon which 
are also pretty cheap on AliExpress.

Let us know how it goes. RAID 10 is probably the best one for both speed 
and safety.

On 11/01/2021 11:50, Stewart Larner via Colchester wrote:
> I'm hoping it will be fast. The new raid cards got delivered today so 
> i can actually make it work now. I'm using the Dell Perc H700 card. 
> It's going to be running on Bare Metal on debian 10 (my favorite 
> distro and has been for years)
>
> Ive never messed about with Proxmox ive always usd VMware Esxi. I have 
> a little server here at home its one of the HP Microservers g8 with a 
> quad core Xeon 16Gb of ram. I use this for PI-Hole Dns server / Home 
> assistant server (Debian 11) and my Reef fish tank monitoring device.
>
> Stewart
>
>
> On Mon, 11 Jan 2021 at 00:57, Wayland Sothcott via Colchester 
> <colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk <mailto:colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk>> 
> wrote:
>
>     Happy New Year Stuart,
>
>     That sounds like fun. That should be fast with the mirrored
>     striped SSD RAID. Remember to tune your server configs to take
>     advantage of the massive RAM and cores I expect you have. Have you
>     figured out iSCSI yet? I gave it a go, quite cool but a bit slow
>     on a 1gig network.
>
>     I've built a Proxmox based on ZFS of 8 2.7GB SAS drives. I had a
>     couple of drives left over so I built a FreeNAS on ZFS. In terms
>     of storage FreeNAS is loads better but ProxMox is great for VMs.
>
>     I've also tinkered with GamerOS, this is basically what SteamOS
>     was supposed to be. It turns a PC into a gaming console and you
>     use your Steam account. It requires a Vulkan GPU which is either
>     an HD 7000 series or later or the integrated GPU in an i5 etc.
>
>     It did even get it going on my ProxMox as a VM but my GPU is only
>     an HD 5000 series.
>
>     Regards.
>
>     Wayland.
>
>     On 11/01/2021 00:05, Stewart Larner via Colchester wrote:
>>     Happy New year everyone! if we can call it a happy start to the
>>     year!
>>
>>     Has anyone been tinkering with anymore Linux Projects while being
>>     stuck at home? if you are.
>>
>>     I'm in the process of building a RAID 10 SSD powered MYSQL server
>>     with 10G Uplink for a Zabbix monitoring system.
>>
>>     I won an ebay bid a couple of months ago and won many servers for
>>     £300. Works out they came with 14TB of storage between them all!
>>
>>     Ended up with a couple of Dell r610's
>>     Dell R410 - This is what im using for the SQL Server
>>     3 HP SAN's full of 450Gb drives
>>     Couple of HP servers too.
>>
>>     All good fun
>>
>>     Hope you are all keeping well
>>
>>     Stewart
>>
>>
>>
>>     On Fri, 1 Jan 2021 at 13:50, Wayland Sothcott via Colchester
>>     <colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk
>>     <mailto:colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk>> wrote:
>>
>>         I love Mint. I set up a monthly $10 donation.
>>
>>         On 01/01/2021 13:33, Martyn via Colchester wrote:
>>         > I wonder if Manjaro will ever sort out its nvidia
>>         dependencies? Pamac
>>         > has issues at almost every update.
>>         >
>>         > Mint on the other hand is always sweet as a nut.
>>         >
>>         > Have a great New Year all.
>>         >
>>         > Martyn.
>>         >
>>         > On 01/01/2021 10:57, Wayland Sothcott via Colchester wrote:
>>         >> With another year of lockdowns even more time to tinker
>>         with Linux,
>>         >> yeah!
>>         >> Playing with GamerOS right now.
>>         >>
>>         >
>>
>>
>>         -- 
>>         Colchester mailing list
>>         Colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk
>>         <mailto:Colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk>
>>         https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/colchester
>>
>>
>
>     -- 
>     Colchester mailing list
>     Colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk <mailto:Colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk>
>     https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/colchester
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/colchester/attachments/20210111/e7dded1c/attachment-0001.html>