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Once you've enabled deduplication, it will be effective whenever you write data to the pool (which, because ZFS is copy-on-write, includes any time you change data on the pool).

You've stated a requirement for 32 TB capacity, and ideally 48 TB. FreeNAS (or no doubt any number of other solutions) can certainly manage that, but you won't get there with 8 x 4 TB disks if you want any redundancy. With 12 x 4 TB disks in a single RAIDZ2 vdev (which is on the edge of what's...

The IBM M1015 is pretty much a rebadged LSI 9211-8i; that same card has also been sold under Dell's name, though I don't recall the model designation off the top of my head. It, and all the 9211 variants, work very well under FreeNAS. They're also considerably less expensive on eBay. When...

That could be a helpful point. Is there a difference in performance between VIRTIO and VIRTIO SCSI?

It's true that FreeNAS doesn't like hardware RAID controllers, though this is more a ZFS thing than specifically a FreeNAS thing. If replacing the H700 with an HBA isn't an option, you should also remove NAS4Free from your list--it's still using the same FreeBSD ZFS code. I haven't used iSCSI...

I can't speak to Omnios at all. NAS4Free is what used to be FreeNAS, before iXSystems bought the FreeNAS name and developed a whole new product under it. FreeNAS seems quite popular, and has worked well for me. It's also the basis for a fairly popular commercial product, TrueNAS. In what...

That does seem to have the answer. Virtio it is. Thanks!

No, ZFS deduplication doesn't work after the data is written. Are you sure you have enough RAM? At least with FreeBSD's ZFS implementation, they recommend a minimum of 5 GB RAM per TB of storage, on top of any other RAM requirements (e.g., for ARC, or for actually running your VMs)

The installation guide at http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Installation#Virtual_Machines_.28KVM.29 suggests using virtio if the guest OS supports it. I'll be installing a CentOS 6 VM, which does seem to support virtio, but I'm seeing some comments around here suggesting that VIRTIO SCSI might be...

That suggests that an SLOG would help out.

Ran through those steps, and they appear to work fine. Thanks again!

That would seem like the obvious choice, not sure how I missed it. Thanks! To carry the thought further, if the GUI will move/convert a virtual disk image to a zvol, there really isn't any reason to manually convert a .vmdk into a .qcow2, is there? The workflow would then look like: Copy...

I've installed Proxmox VE 4 on ZFS (currently a single disk for testing, will be on a larger pool in production), and set up ZFS storage on the server. I've created a couple of VMs on the machine, and I see that their virtual disks are being created as zvols, which makes perfect sense. I have...

Yeah, I know how ZFS loves its RAM. Which I guess brings up another question--how much of what I know about ZFS from FreeNAS should I expect to be relevant to ZFS on Linux?

It's a small Internet, isn't it? But thanks for the assurance. There's a lot of stuff to go over, but it's starting to come together and make sense. And now I see that network configuration is available in the web GUI, so I need to poke around there some more as well obviously. Does the...

Another source that seems to have some good information on L2ARC and SLOG devices is http://louwrentius.com/things-you-should-consider-when-building-a-zfs-nas.html. I don't agree with everything he has to say there, but the explanation of those devices seems pretty reasonable.

Correct. RAIDZ1 is comparable to RAID5, and RAIDZ2 is comparable to RAID6. I don't believe there's anything analogous to RAIDZ3 in the traditional RAID levels, but it has three disks' worth of parity. They will tolerate the failure of one, two, or three disks, respectively, without data loss...

It's a fair question, and one for which I probably should have had a better answer in mind when I made that statement. The best answer I can give is that all the ZFS docs, whether from Oracle, or FreeBSD, or open-zfs.org, or Illumos, or zfsonlinux.org, all use the term "mirror", not "RAID1". I...

ZFS doesn't, strictly speaking, have the traditional numbered RAID levels (0, 1, 5, 6, 10, etc.). It instead has stripes, mirrors, and RAIDZ(1,2,3). Stripes are similar to RAID0, mirrors to RAID1, and RAIDZ1, 2, and 3 are comparable to RAID5, 6, and (nonexistent triple-parity RAID)...

Thanks, that helps. Since Proxmox has the turnkey installer, I'd assumed that it had a web GUI or some other sort of "easy" UI for most, if not all, of the system administration, as both SME Server and FreeNAS do. If this were the case, it would suggest that things like, e.g., configuring...