Lee H. Marzke on 2 Mar 2017 11:26:11 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] openATTIC?


I believe the site say even says OpenAttic is in development and not for production.    Who would use
that at work ?   I won't even use FreeNAS at work,  and spend lots of bucks for
Nexenta etc.   Nexenta has listed hardware SKU's that you can buy from Dell, or Supermicro
that are certified with the software.  Plus they release new Nexenta patches that are packaged
and tested with OS updates in the same package.

FYI,  If your ZIL/Slog doesn't have supercaps it's going to eventually lose data on a power fail, and
the software docs don't always cover this.  So HW cert is important.

The other issue is that disks slots have to be marked externally with the disk serial number/GUID
when you build the unit,  since there is no way to tell which of 8 disks is  'da3'  for example.
The more expensive systems like Nexenta ( not FreeNAS )  have ways telling you which slot the failed disk is
in.   My Nexenta system has a  Dell JBOD with 60 disks in a 4U cabinet, with orange lights to mark
failed disks right next to the disk.  This is HW dependant, so a software only solution generally cant do it.

It is really a surprise when da3 is bad and you can't tell which disk to pull - other than guessing
from the disk activity lights for example.  Guess wrong and you lose your whole pool.  Of course
you should be backing up - so now I also use ZFS send replication to rsync.net

Lee

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Vossen JP" <jp@jpsdomain.org>
> To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2017 1:44:48 PM
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] openATTIC?

> Thanks Lee, that's about what I got out of the docs too.  It's not my
> call, it's IT at $WORK, but I was wondering if anyone had run into it.
> Guess not.
> 
> On 02/25/2017 11:10 AM, Lee H. Marzke wrote:
>> Interesting find.
>>
>> Just reading the docs,
>>
>> It seems to be package based and installs on Debian Jessie, RHEL7, Ubuntu 14.04,
>> etc.
>> Supports ZFS, Linux LVM,  DRBD,  Ceph object storage.
>>
>> After living with some bugs in FreeNAS that caused random crashes ( 1 / week ) ,
>> I'd be
>> concerned about stability for any new project.   My FreeNAS is now stable on
>> 9.10.  FYI
>> the FreeNAS 10 is at Beta 2,  and has much more support for BSD jails.
>>
>> My use case is running numerous VMware ESXi VM's stablity is important to me.
>> If you need
>> object storage or are not running VMware ESX this may not be important to you.
>>
>> My older FreeNAS unit would crash ( may have been related to a single plug-in
>> jail I was using ), and
>> after it rebooted the ESXi VM's would recover and I never new about the problem
>> for a few months.
>> Seems my combination of NFS hard mounts to ESXi ,  and Sync writes, allowed ESXi
>> VM's to
>> pick up where they left and were pretty much un-affected by FreeNAs being down
>> for 10 min.
>>
>> I'd think that supporting one OS build would be more likely to be stable than
>> supporting
>> a bunch of OS's with packages.
>>
>> OpenAttic seems to have more features than FreeNAS ,  but I don't know if that
>> is a benefit or not,  as your not
>> likely to use more than a few of the storage systems.
>>
>> FreeNAS doesn't have DRBD,  but of course has ZFS send/receive.
>>
>> A quick look at OpenAttic  shows no support listed for ZFS snapshot replication
>> ( other than the base command-line ZFS send
>> command )  Replication requires orchestration of creating snaps,  replication
>> and deleting them, so you would have to write
>> all this yourself or find a solution that plugs into OpenAttic.   Seem like a
>> lot of usability features are just missing - but
>> I'd have to look at the real GUI to be sure.   Perhaps they may add these
>> features in time.
>>
>> From a quick look at the GUI preview, it seem to only report disks/pools,  so I
>> assume all change are done via
>> the command line.  The GUI download says it's in development (  so  you have to
>> ask what kind of bugs show up when
>> the gui and other parts are released seperately )
>>
>> For backup/replication of FreeNAS,  I've been using  Rsync.net ,  as they
>> switched their whole infrastructure over to
>> ZFS,  and now provide ZFS snapshot replication ( that works transparently with
>> FreeNAS ).   Their entry level 1TB account
>> supports this now.  So you cat get real SAN replication ( with guest quiesce )
>> to a low cost rsync account for very low cost.
>>
>> FreeNAs has integration with vSphere API's for those who care.   For instance
>> FreeNAS snapshots can trigger a prior vSPhere snap
>> which triggers a OS quiese via VMware Tools  in Windows or linux guests.   So
>> you FreeNAs snaps may be able to get consistent
>> copies of running DB's.
>>
>> Lee
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Vossen JP" <jp@jpsdomain.org>
>>> To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List"
>>> <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
>>> Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2017 12:50:56 AM
>>> Subject: [PLUG] openATTIC?
>>
>>> Anyone using or heard of http://openattic.org/
>>>
>>> openATTIC — the only storage system you'll ever need
>>> create and manage storage ... with open source on linux ... via a simple
>>> user interface
>>>
>>> I've used http://www.freenas.org/ before and that worked very well.
>>> openATTIC seems slicker in some ways, but it's installed on top of a
>>> random Linux OS, not basically a FreeBSD appliance like FreeNAS is.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
> 
> Thanks,
> JP
> --  -------------------------------------------------------------------
> JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
> ___________________________________________________________________________
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-- 
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..." - Kryptos 

Lee Marzke, lee@marzke.net http://marzke.net/lee/ 
IT Consultant, VMware, VCenter, SAN storage, infrastructure, SW CM 
+1 800-393-5217 office +1 484-348-2230 fax 
+1 252 627-9531 sms ( 252 MARZKE1 )
___________________________________________________________________________
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