[kwlug-disc] Docker Host Appliance

[Andrew Sullivan Cant]

This discussion does make me think I should really try out TrueNAS. But 
I will probably still procrastinate it. ;)

Jason, I think your presentation is going to have some coverage and 
maybe after that we can consider if we want more?

Chris, I also agree that TrueNAS the the project that also looks the 
most like a product. I am also cheap so, I will probably never buy their 
brand new hardware, but I appreciate that it exists.

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

This feels safer. I can learn this, and have a fall back to just paying 
for it. I guess this is adopting the puppy problem. It is nice to be 
able to adopt the puppy, but having a well managed kennels I can just 
pay for is good to.
(gosh, spelling kennel was hard. knell, kneel and finally kennel :) )



Andrew



On 2023-01-16 17:45, Chris Irwin via kwlug-disc wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 15, 2023, at 21:24, Doug Moen wrote:
>> ZFS has a limitation where you can not add disks to a RAIDz vdev.
> 
> This is the big one, off the top of my head.
> 
> I'm specifically listing my ZFS gripes here. I don't totally hate the 
> filesystem. It has some features that are pretty good. Encryption is 
> built-in, and basically a check-box when creating a dataset. BTRFS 
> doesn't yet have FSCRYPT support, so encryption needs to be layered 
> either above (ecryptfs) or below (dmcrypt). That sucks for a number of 
> reasons.
> 
> Also, TrueNAS itself seems to have the best Web UI from the options I 
> looked at, and is truly more of a "Storage Appliance" than anything 
> other than an actual physical appliance (synology, etc). All the other 
> options were much more "Debian, but with a basic web interface and a 
> logo". TrueNAS actually feels like a real product.
> 
> To be fair, most of my issues are non-issues for the real target for 
> ZFS: Businesses with money. If I had a formal budget, forecasted data 
> growth, and probably upgraded servers/drives with warranty cycles, most 
> of these issues are a non concern.
> 
> But I'm a home user. And a cheap one, at that. I have a bunch of data 
> and a bunch of disks, and I want to be reasonably sure both the data 
> (and backups) are valid.
> 
> Back in the day I had 2 drives. Eventually I wanted to expand, so I 
> bought two more drives, and added them to the filesystem (was using 
> btrfs). Run a rebalance, it shifts data around, and I have a bunch more 
> storage capacity.
> 
> With ZFS, I don't think I can do that. I can't take my four drives, and 
> turn it into a six-drive array. I'd either have to build a whole new 
> larger array (vdev?) and migrate to that, then throw out the old disks. 
> Or replace all the old disks with new, larger ones one-by-one, finally 
> resizing the array once all the disks are larger. Then throw out the old 
> disks. Or have a second array and split my data.
> 
> I've been using mdadm (+lvm) and btrfs for a lot of years, and with 
> either of those, you can easily add disks and expand your array. You can 
> switch redundancy levels on the fly, if you wanted. WIth BTRFS if I had 
> four disks and one failed (and I have enough free space), I could 
> rebalance the array to use one fewer drive and recover a measure of 
> redundancy while waiting for stock/sale/shipping/payday.
> 
> ZFS also can't fully utilize mismatched disks, apparently. My 4-drive 
> array has 2x6TB and 2x8TB drives, which means there's 2x2TB worth of 
> unusable space on the 8TB drives. This worked fine with btrfs.
> 
> This is a "me" problem, but snapshots don't seem to be visible with ZFS, 
> so recovering a file takes some extra steps with the TrueNAS Web UI to 
> clone a snapshot. On btrfs, you can just 'cp' the file from your 
> snapshot, no extra commands, tools, or effort required.
> 
> I also find the new terminology and new layers confusing (vdev, zpool, 
> dataset, zvol, raidz, etc). Granted, this is a "me" problem as well, 
> since I undestand pvs, vgs, and lvs just fine. I'll learn, I just wish I 
> didn't have to. Also, why vdev & dataset, and not zdev and zdataset? No 
> idea.
> 
> People claim ZFS handles databases/VMs better than btrfs, but I don't 
> really see how since it appears to use the same COW semantics. Perhaps 
> it's just hidden behind better caching.
> 
> -- 
> *Chris Irwin*
> 
> email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
>    web: https://chrisirwin.ca <https://chrisirwin.ca>
> 
> 
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