Proxmox 4 ZFS newbie !

[hregis]

Hello

I want a simple procedure of installation and optimization of Proxmox 4 with ZFS.
I have a server with two SATA drives of 4TB and 2 SSD 800GB
I followed the procedure of the installation CD and choose RAID1 (no hard raid) with this 4 disks that were selected.

Already is that correct?
Does it automatically manages the cache and logs on SSDs?
Do you recommend me another method of installation and optimization?

because sometimes I find it slow!
slower than a hard raid and ext4!

thank you for your help
Régis

 

[LnxBil]

If you run
zpool status -v
you can see that you used all your devices for data. This is not what you want.

The problem with your setup is that the SSD are too big to be of any use for caching, except you have hundreds of GB of RAM.

 

[hregis]

Is it normal that a ZFS RAID 1 is done on 4 discs of different sizes and that the final height is the sum of these 4 discs, instead of having half?

thank you

~# zpool status -v
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
sda2 ONLINE 0 0 0
sdb ONLINE 0 0 0
sdc ONLINE 0 0 0
sdd ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

 

[hregis]

and why this process use all processors ? thanks

1192 root 1 -19 0 0 0 S 49.6 0.0 12:05.88 z_wr_iss
1194 root 1 -19 0 0 0 S 48.6 0.0 12:12.43 z_wr_iss
1193 root 1 -19 0 0 0 S 36.7 0.0 12:03.87 z_wr_iss
1479 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 28.4 0.0 18:11.62 txg_sync
1191 root 1 -19 0 0 0 S 28.1 0.0 12:05.16 z_wr_iss
1189 root 1 -19 0 0 0 S 26.8 0.0 11:52.94 z_wr_iss
1190 root 1 -19 0 0 0 S 19.8 0.0 12:01.50 z_wr_iss

 

[LnxBil]

Is it normal that a ZFS RAID 1 is done on 4 discs of different sizes and that the final height is the sum of these 4 discs, instead of having half?

Yes, ZFS always shows the complete pool size. Your files are stored with twice their size.

 

[LnxBil]

and why this process use all processors ? thanks

1192 root       1 -19       0      0      0 S  49.6  0.0  12:05.88 z_wr_iss                                                                                 
1194 root       1 -19       0      0      0 S  48.6  0.0  12:12.43 z_wr_iss                                                                                 
1193 root       1 -19       0      0      0 S  36.7  0.0  12:03.87 z_wr_iss                                                                                 
1479 root      20   0       0      0      0 R  28.4  0.0  18:11.62 txg_sync                                                                                 
1191 root       1 -19       0      0      0 S  28.1  0.0  12:05.16 z_wr_iss                                                                                 
1189 root       1 -19       0      0      0 S  26.8  0.0  11:52.94 z_wr_iss                                                                                 
1190 root       1 -19       0      0      0 S  19.8  0.0  12:01.50 z_wr_iss

First, please encapsulate output always in the CODE environment which is much more readable.

The processes are normal. They are all kernel processes/threads (therefore the []) and normally you will have at least one process/thread per cpu thread and also different threads ,so in sum: a lot.

I have over 1000:

root@zfs-box ~ > ps aux | grep -Ece '\[.*(z_|zil|txg|arc|spl|metaslab)'
1041

 

[MikeP]

I'm a 10-year veteran/n00b with *nix in general. I am also a bit of a n00b with ProxMox and ZFS. So far I like them both.

I have a similar 2 SSD and 2 HDD setup for my first second first real test box. I installed 4.0 on the SSD formatting it as ZFS to start with. Then, only the SSD's show up in ProxMox. Then, I created another ZFS on the 2 disk HDD with a new name. They are separate. I can select where to put downloaded images, and the disks for the VM/CT, and backups, etc. - SSD or HDD. So far so good.
I'm still learning this stuff.
I did not do an L2ARC or ZIL on SSD. Not sure how/if/what's best for those since I already have the SSD's formatted as ZFS... Maybe a new ZVOL for the ZIL and L2?