Just getting started with Amahi - first question - using ZFS

[taylorfamily1994]

I *think* I want to use ZFS raid-z instead of Greyhole for my disk solution on Fedora. Do you have to use Greyhole with Amahi? I would assume 'no' but perhaps I'm wrong. (I haven't gotten started yet)

After looking at the Fedora 14 Installation Instructions, I would do step 15 THEN move to ZFS configuration, and then come back and proceed with step 16?
(These instructions: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Fedora_ ... structions)

Does that sound right?

[bigfoot65]

Probably would work. However we do not support that file system, so cannot guarantee how things will work.

You would also have to disable Greyhole as its integrated with Amahi and on by default. There is guidance in the wiki on how to do so.

[radioz]

Disabling Greyhole is no problem. That is how my machine is running.
My system is setup using LVM with a Raid 1 configuration. Works fine.

I have no clue about ZFS.

[hemminger]

You need a kernel that supports ZFS in order for it to work on a zfs files system. Linux due to zfs licensing conflicts doesn't support ZFS as the host filesystem. zfs-fuse allows linux to interact with it as seperate drives mounted to linux.

I'm looking at creating a nexentastor storage appliance which uses a solaris kernel in ubuntu environment and uses zfs as the filesystem. I'll share out it's storage with either nfs or iscsi to amahi and setup the os and / on a small disk and have the fileshare mounted to /var and then do my install of amahi and disable grey hole so that all the amahi bits are hows on the virtual drive on nexenta stor and you gain all the advantages of an advanced storage system like drive expanding etc...

[taylorfamily1994]

Native ZFS on Linux:

http://zfsonlinux.org/

[hemminger]

That is great I was unaware of that project, but per their site, "Please keep in mind the current 0.5.2 stable release does not yet support a mountable filesystem. This functionality is currently available only in the 0.6.0-rc6 release candidate."

So you probably wont be able to make it your boot partition and it's problably not stable enough for large production use yet. Hope to see it continue and grow. ZFS is an awesome file system.

[taylorfamily1994]

I know - I had actually missed that part about 0.5.2 and mountable filesystems. I am trying to compile the latest release anyway so that's not too big of a deal.

Took me forever to get my kernel to compile without CONFIG_PREEMPT enabled but I finally figured it out - apparently when you build a new kernel using the Fedora tools, it does a merge with several other config files to get all the config settings in one large config file for the new kernel. One of the configs kept overriding my CONFIG_PREEMPT setting with the default from Fedora. Once I figured that out I was able to get the kernel built.

Then I discovered that the ZFS project on Linux really wants a 64-bit OS (and ZFS doesn't run well on 32-bit). So now I'm rebuilding my image to use a 64-bit Fedora 14 release. We'll see how it works out.

I'm not set on ZFS but it would be nice to have the features.

[liamb]

Did you end up using ZFS successfully with Amahi? I am looking at doing something similar and interested to hear how it went some months down the track.