Ok, this is more of a Random Post than anything else, but here goes nothing…

I have been playing with ZFS for the last couple of weeks, under a VMWare VM with a copy of Nexenta Core and i am quite impressed.

Some things i have learned to do and how they work below:

  • some basics on creating ZFS pools: Part 1 and Part 2. very handy stuff. even shows how to break and fix pools! Very cool!
  • ZFS and ISCSI. the big thing this shows is backing up OSX to ZFS using time machine, but @harryd71 says in this tweet that iSCSI cant be used to restore… you would need to reinstall your OS then recover files manually…
  • Constantin’s Blooog (not a miss type, its actually called that!) has a tip to get faster iSCSI performance out of Windows. Not sure if this works yet… my perf is about 25mb/s from iSCSI and the same from SMB, and the VM is using the same drives… if i move to a separate machine, we se what happens then.
  • 2 posts on getting ZFS snapshots backed up to Amazon S3: one for EC2 based machines, but could work with all… and one including Encryption. This is a very cool idea. only problem is i have a LOT of data i would like backed up: about 80+ Gig of photos, growing more and more each month… couple Gig of SVN archives, few more Gig of DB and website backups  and more… need more upload bandwidth for this to work quickly enough…
  • Constantin’s Blooog has a post on using ZFS with USB Disks. He also has tips for ZFS starters and a script for Replicating ZFS Snapshots…
  • Last, but not least, Don MacAskill from Smugmug has a section dedicated to ZFS on his blog. Very cool stuff here.

So, thats pretty much it. i will leave you with this (click to see the full size)

vsan-zpool-status

this is the status of my mini SAN here… not doing a lot, but those disks are all 16Gb, in RAID 6 (ZRAID2). and its nice and fast!