ZFS vs PERC H710P Mini

[killmasta93]

Hi,
I was wondering if someone could shed some light, Currently have DELL R720 with Hyper V, RAID 1 hardware SAS 15kRPM for the OS and a raid 5 (i know its bad but it was configured around 3 years ago not by me) Hardware with 6 Disks of 15k RPM for disk D (the vm in hyper V), My question is should i use LVM-Thin with the perc adapter or put it ahci and use RAID 10 for the 6 disks and use ZFS

Thank you

 

[cserem]

Hi,
I was wondering if someone could shed some light, Currently have DELL R720 with Hyper V, RAID 1 hardware SAS 15kRPM for the OS and a raid 5 (i know its bad but it was configured around 3 years ago not by me) Hardware with 6 Disks of 15k RPM for disk D (the vm in hyper V), My question is should i use LVM-Thin with the perc adapter or put it ahci and use RAID 10 for the 6 disks and use ZFS

Hello!

Choose a volume manager/filesystem for your needs (features, performance).
Feature-wise: I think nothing compares to ZFS on Proxmox.
Performance-wise: do your benchmarks, but HW raid10 and LVM thin will probably be faster than anything.

 

[killmasta93]

Thanks for the reply, so HW with LVM vs ZFS without a slog im guessing HW wins? What benchmarks do you recommend running for a VM which is going run an SQL

 

[cserem]

I have used bonnie++ before with success.

If possible I would establish a baseline in the current setup (benchmark of choice, or better yet perfomance statistics from the database application itself), then move to ZFS, if it is too slow you could switch to hw raid 10 with lvm. Ofcourse, for this you would need to reinstall the whole thing and restore from backup multiple times.

 

[killmasta93]

Thanks for the reply, i guess for now im going to stick with the hardware even though i love zfs but i guess if it comes with the hardware RAID i guess i should leave it unless anyone else has another input?

 

[Nemesiz]

If you know and love ZFS why you go to HW Raid? it must be you don't need data protection.

 

[killmasta93]

Well because its already there the HW, for the data protection i have 3 sets of backups so im not worries with APC if the lights go out i just need speed

 

[Nemesiz]

How about bit rot ?

 

[killmasta93]

bit rot? not sure what you mean?

 

[Nemesiz]

bit rot | bit roll | silence corruption - the data corruption then HDD give bad data or the cable leads to distort information.

 

[marianh]

Hi,

I will have the same controller (PERC H710P Mini) in the server.
I'm buying a used server so I can't change it.

What's the best approach?
1) Many "RAID-0" disks and ZFS RAIDZ-2? But it will hide the hardware from ZFS...
2) Hardware Raid-6 and ZFS on it, for it's flexibility and compression?
3) Hardware Raid-6 and other filesystem, e.g. xfs?
4) something else?

There'll be 6 (used) SAS HDDs in the raid array, memory will be ECC.

Thnks...

 

[aaron]

What's the best approach?
1) Many "RAID-0" disks and ZFS RAIDZ-2? But it will hide the hardware from ZFS...
2) Hardware Raid-6 and ZFS on it, for it's flexibility and compression?
3) Hardware Raid-6 and other filesystem, e.g. xfs?
4) something else?

Either option 3 or option 4: Buy an HBA controller and attach the back plane to it instead of the PERC.

Option 1 and two will be problematic in one way or the other. 1 will make it hard to replace a failed disk. 2 will rob ZFS of all the nice features and the ability to recover from a problem.
Both will cost you performance because the RAID controller will try to be smart and work against ZFS (caches and such).

 

[marianh]

Thanks!

 

[Jota V.]

I'm running a R620 with a PERC H710 Mini running in IT mode following this guide https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc/

Important. Follow all steps and read it carefully or you can damage/brick your H710.

 

[lmiksche]

Thanks it has done it, so even when u can get drives in HBA u still need to flash to IT for TrueNAS!
Thank You again guys!

 

[lmiksche]

Just an add on...
The ZFS performance on 2 different configs i tried:
8 drives 1) 1 VDEV Z2 and 2) 2 VDEVs Z1 was shockingly poor on Freenas. It hardly got passed 200MB/s read. Drive sectors are 512b as it should.
So i swapped to H710p, created RAID6 and gave it to FreeNAS as single drive. No im just saturating 10G network to full.