PBS and btrfs
- Thread starter Shazan
- Start date
Hi,
Cookiefamily is totally correct.
To add a bit on top of that: we have a bit bigger (100 TiB) setup which we tried with both ZFS and btrfs, they worked both pretty well when having in mind that the underlying disks are spinners.
I'd recommend using the newer 5.11 kernel (available as opt-in for PBS similar to PVE) and btrfs-progs from buster-backports, as it includes quite some enhancements in especially the btrfs area. But in general we did not see any real blocker, so it's fine to use if you prefer it, e.g., due to running it on other hosts already.
Cookiefamily is totally correct.
To add a bit on top of that: we have a bit bigger (100 TiB) setup which we tried with both ZFS and btrfs, they worked both pretty well when having in mind that the underlying disks are spinners.
I'd recommend using the newer 5.11 kernel (available as opt-in for PBS similar to PVE) and btrfs-progs from buster-backports, as it includes quite some enhancements in especially the btrfs area. But in general we did not see any real blocker, so it's fine to use if you prefer it, e.g., due to running it on other hosts already.
@t.lamprecht
Are there any news about the plans to offer a btrfs storage plugin in proxmox (pve/pbs)?
Marco
Are there any news about the plans to offer a btrfs storage plugin in proxmox (pve/pbs)?
Marco
Hello,
ZFS on an older server or one without ECC, combined with new CMR or SMR HDDs, tends to degrade constantly. I’ll test BTRFS to see how it performs—it would be great if it could be integrated directly into PBS.
Thank you very much.
About datastore, page 29 of pdf says:
Thanks
How accurate is this, so other options like btrfs could work? I thought that, because of "things related to how chunks are managed", btrfs could have some incompatibility, but I'm happy if the list of supported filesystems for a datastore is open.
Thanks
BTRFS is much better than ext4 and XFS. Unlike ZFS, BTRFS is a native Linux file system.
I’ll run tests on my PBS using the same drives that fail with ZFS and will share the results.
My test server is a ProLiant ML310e Gen8 / iLO 4 running PBS v3.2-9.
Yes btrfs should work fine from a files system feature POV.
For the PBS use case it probably will not be plain better than xfs or ext4 in terms of performance, but it allows for safe software RAID (besides RAID56 mode, which is still unstable).
Last edited:
Is RAID5/6 safe to use with BTRFS now? I remember that it was considered to be loosing to data loss
The official BTRFS status docs still declare RAID56 as unstable:
https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Status.html#block-group-profiles
Ok, thanks for the clarification. I wondered because of your point that it allows "safe software RAID". Now I don't want to be a nitpicker but I think it's important to point out before somebody gets the wrong idea and risks their data.
No you're definitively right, I edited my answer – while it might be somewhat wide-spread knowledge in Linux dev/admin circles, that's no reason to not mentioned that subtle knowledge explicitly.