ZFS in Unraid?

[Camofelix]

Hey Everyone! 

 

TLDR; I've been running FreeNAS 11.2-U6 on an hp ml 350 g6 for about 3 years now. I'm running a RaidZ1 with 3 3TB WD Red's, a 240 GB nvme as my arc2 cache, mirrored flash drives for the os, and 144gb of registered ECC. 

I've been having a LOT of trouble with FreeNAS, especially as it comes to the os getting random permission errors. This includes issues with FreeBSD jails, pluggins, Docker/RancherOS and general VM's. I love ZFS, and would like to stay with it, but am looking for an alternative OS that is also fairly idiot proof (for when I don't have time to deal with it.) 

 

My hardware is known good from stress testing, and having re installed FreeNAS a few dozen times now and having had to constantly fix different things that routinely break, I'd prefer to not have to deal with it anymore. 

 

Open to any and all suggestions, and willing to throw a few bucks at the problem for the OS if that the best route. 

 

Thanks and have a wonderful day, 

 

FelixCLC

 

[Windows7ge]

From what I've been told and understand UNRAID does not support ZFS. Although it should be possible to host an OS that does in a VM. Other ways to do it (native perhaps) I don't know.

 

If you want ZFS and a good hypervisor you can use Debian Linux and install the packages that manage each function. You can also install a desktop to make it more user friendly.

 

I have a tutorial on how to setup a Debian based file server via CLI using ZFS:

To reiterate a desktop can be installed. You can then install something like virt-manager+ovmf to host your VMs.

[Camofelix]

36 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

From what I've been told and understand UNRAID does not support ZFS. Although it should be possible to host an OS that does in a VM. Other ways to do it (native perhaps) I don't know.

 

If you want ZFS and a good hypervisor you can use Debian Linux and install the packages that manage each function. You can also install a desktop to make it more user friendly.

 

I have a tutorial on how to setup a Debian based file server via CLI using ZFS:

To reiterate a desktop can be installed. You can then install something like virt-manager+ovmf to host your VMs.

Will take a look and report back, thank you! 

[2FA]

3 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

 

unRAID is just Debian Slackware based so you technically can use ZFS but it's janky as hell. Wendell just set up a NAS for GamersNexus using this setup. TLDW You need at least two drives for the unRAID official array to use Docker/VMs, and can then use ZFS for the rest of your drives using the standard ZFS commands. Kind of a pointless setup if you ask me except for the turnkey aspect of the Community Applications plugin.

[Windows7ge]

50 minutes ago, 2FA said:

unRAID is just Debian based so you technically can use ZFS but it's janky as hell. Wendell just set up a NAS for GamersNexus using this setup. TLDW You need at least two drives for the unRAID official array to use Docker/VMs, and can then use ZFS for the rest of your drives using the standard ZFS commands. Kind of a pointless setup if you ask me except for the turnkey aspect of the Community Applications plugin.

I saw the video where Wendell said he planned on doing that (after helping GN). I haven't seen the follow-up video if there is one.

 

The way I see it UnRAID is kind of a purpose built solution. Whenever I hear about people using it it's always for the exact same use cases file server or VMs. I've not heard about how flexible the OS is with installing different file systems or programs as freely as other Debian distributions.

[2FA]

12 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I saw the video where Wendell said he planned on doing that (after helping GN). I haven't seen the follow-up video if there is one.

 

The way I see it UnRAID is kind of a purpose built solution. Whenever I hear about people using it it's always for the exact same use cases file server or VMs. I've not heard about how flexible the OS is with installing different file systems or programs as freely as other Debian distributions.

I'm going to have to correct myself, it's based on Slackware, not Debian so no apt. You can install Slackware packages by putting them in /boot/extra so that they are installed on next boot, and use installpkg for current session, or of course compile it yourself. It really isn't that flexible, hence why I called Wendel's ZFS implementation janky. It's a turnkey solution.

[Nick7]

You can try Proxmox.

It's generally used for Virtualization, but has support for ZFS in it (Linux based - so you can also customize it a bit, if needed).