ZFS over iSCSI

[dignus]

We're researching a storage solution to replace current solution. Few commercials vendors in play, but since we're huge fans of ZFS, using ZFS over iscsi might be an option as well.

Is anyone here on the forum using it in production? Any issues you ran into?

 

[aaron]

While I personally cannot contribute with experience, I want to make sure you are aware that ZFS over iSCSI means that the iSCSI target needs to run ZFS and that the zvols will be exported as iSCSI targets. Proxmox VE will connect to the iSCSI target machine and manage ZFS and the iSCSI exports.

 

[dignus]

Yes, this is known Having ZFS underneath is a huge plus if you ask me.

 

[LnxBil]

Is anyone here on the forum using it in production?

Yes, I built it myself on top of Debian and it was very easy. I used @fireon's tutorial in german. I was also able to adopt it to FC and played around with it in my dev environment.

Any issues you ran into?

Not yet. It gets slow at times, but that is mainly the underlying hardware and only a little bit ZFS overhead. It is obviously not as fast as it could be with LVM, but we all know that.

I can also recommend to look at the ZFS-based solutions of Blockbridge / @bbgeek17 - I haven't tried them myself but they look promising.