ZFS Pool Versions

I was looking for an overview of the available ZFS Pool Versions. The Opensolaris XWiki Page of the ZFS Group show on page for every page, but not an complete overview.

History of FreeBSD releases with ZFS is as follows:

7.0+ - original ZFS import, ZFS v6; requires significant tuning for stable operation (no longer supported)

7.2 - still ZFS v6, improved memory handling, amd64 may need no memory tuning (no longer supported)

7.3+ - backport of new ZFS v13 code, similar to the 8.0 code

8.0 - new ZFS v13 code, lots of bug fixes - recommended over all past versions. (no longer supported)

8.1+ - ZFS v14

8.2+ - ZFS v15

9.0+ - ZFS v28

Here I list of all current Versions until today 9-May-2011

ZFS Pool Version 31

This version includes support for improved 'zfs list' performance.

Pool version 31 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 150

The change record for the version 31 change is:

6980669 zfs rename -r is slow, causes appliance UI to hang

ZFS Pool Version 30

This version includes support for ZFS encryption.

Pool version 30 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 149

The change record for the version 30 change is:

4854202 ZFS data set encryption

ZFS Pool Version 29

This version includes support for the RAID-Z/mirror hybrid allocator.

Pool version 29 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 148

The change record for the version 29 change is:

6977913 RAID-Z/mirror hybrid allocator

ZFS Pool Version 28

This version includes support for multiple virtual device replacements.

Pool version 28 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 147

The change record for the version 28 change is:

6782540 zpool cannot replace a replacing device

ZFS Pool Version 27

This version includes support for improved snapshot creation performance.

Pool version 27 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 145

The change record for the version 27 change is:

6844896 recursive snapshots take a long time

ZFS Pool Version 26

This version includes support for improved snapshot deletion performance.

Pool version 26 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 141

The change record for the version 26 change is:

6948890 snapshot deletion can induce pathologically long spa_sync() times

ZFS Pool Version 25

This version includes support for improved pool scrubbing and resilvering statistics.

Pool version 25 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 140

The change record for the version 25 change is:

6391915 provide interval arg to zpool status to monitor resilvering

ZFS Pool Version 24

This version includes support for system attributes.

Pool version 24 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 137

The change records for the version 24 change are:

6716117 ZFS needs native system attribute infrastructure

6516171 zpl symlinks should have their own object type

ZFS Pool Version 23

This version includes support for the slim ZIL.

Pool version 23 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 135

The change record for the version 23 change is:

6595532 ZIL is too talkative

ZFS Pool Version 22

This version includes support for zfs receive properties.

Pool version 22 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 128

The PSARC case for the version 22 change is:

PSARC/2009/510 ZFS Received Properties

ZFS Pool Version 21

This version includes support for ZFS deduplication properties.

Pool version 21 is available in this release:

Nevada, build 128

The PSARC case for the version 21 change is:

PSARC/2009/571 ZFS Deduplication Properties

ZFS Pool Version 20

This version includes the zle compression algorithm that is needed to support the ZFS deduplication properties in ZFS pool version 21. Both pool versions are available in this release:

Nevada, build 128

The PSARC case for the version 20 change is:

PSARC/2009/571 ZFS Deduplication Properties

ZFS Pool Version 19

This version includes support for the following feature:

ZFS log device removal

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 125

The related change record for the version 19 change is:

6574286 removing a slog doesn't work

ZFS Pool Version 18

This version includes support for the following feature:

ZFS snapshot holds

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 121

The related change record for the version 18 change is:

6803121 want user-settable refcounts on snapshots

ZFS Pool Version 17

This version includes support for the following feature:

triple-parity RAID-Z

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 120

The related change record for the version 17 change is:

6854612 triple-parity RAID-Z

ZFS Pool Version 16

This version includes support for the following feature:

STMF property support

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 116

The related bug for the version 16 change is:

6736004 ZFS volumes need an additional property for COMSTAR support

ZFS Pool Version 15

This version includes support for the following features:

userused@... and groupused@... properties

userquota@... and groupquota@... properties

These features are available in:

Nevada, build 114

The related bug and PSARC case for version 15 changes are:

6501037 want user/group quotas on ZFS

PSARC/2009/204 ZFS user/group quotas and space accounting

ZFS Pool Version 14

This version includes support for the following feature:

passthrough-x aclinherit property support

This feature is available in:

OpenSolaris 2009.06, Nevada, build 103

The related bug and PSARC case for the version 14 change are:

6765166 Need to provide mechanism to optionally inherit ACE_EXECUTE

PSARC 2008/659 New ZFS "passthrough-x" ACL inheritance rules

ZFS Pool Version 13

This version includes support for the following features:

usedbysnapshots property

usedbychildren property

usedbyrefreservation property

usedbydataset property

These features are available in:

OpenSolaris 2008.11, Nevada, build 98

The related bug and PSARC case for version 13 change are:

6730799 want user properties on snapshots

PSARC/2008/518 ZFS space accounting enhancements

ZFS Pool Version 12

This version includes support for the following feature:

Snapshot properties

This feature is available in:

OpenSolaris 2008.11, Nevada build 96

The related bug for the version 12 change is:

6701797 want user properties on snapshot

ZFS Pool Version 11

This version includes support for the following feature:

Improved zpool scrub / resilver performance

This feature is available in:

OpenSolaris 2008.11, Nevada, build 94

The related bug for the version 11 change is:

6343667 scrub/resilver has to start over when a snapshot is taken

Note: this bug is fixed when using build 94 even with older pool versions. However, upgrading the pool can improve scrub performance when there are many file systems, snapshots, and clones.

ZFS Pool Version 10

This version includes support for the following feature:

Devices can be added to a storage pool as "cache devices." These devices provide an additional layer of caching between main memory and disk. Using cache devices provides the greatest performance improvement for random read-workloads of mostly static content.

This feature is available in Nevada, build 78.

The Solaris 10 10/08 release includes ZFS pool version 10, but support for cache devices is not included in this Solaris release.

The related bug for the version 10 change is:

6536054 second tier ("external") ARC

ZFS Pool Version 9

This version includes support for the following features:

In addition to the existing ZFS quota and reservation features, this release includes dataset quotas and reservations that do not include descendent datasets, such as snapshots and clones, in the space consumption. ("zfs set refquota" and "zfs set refreservation".)

A reservation is automatically set when a non-sparse ZFS volume is created that matches the size of the volume. This release provides an immediate reservation feature so that you set a reservation on a non-sparse volume with enough space to take snapshots and modify the contents of the volume.

CIFS server support

These features are available in Nevada, build 77.

The related bugs for version 9 changes are:

6431277 want filesystem-only quotas

6483677 need immediate reservation

6617183 CIFS Service - PSARC 2006/715

ZFS Pool Version 8

This version now supports the ability to delegate zfs(1M) administrative tasks to ordinary users.

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 69

Solaris 10 10/08 release

The related bug for the version 8 change is:

6349470 investigate non-root restore/backup

ZFS Pool Version 7

This version includes support for the following feature:

The ZFS Intent Log (ZIL) satisfies the need of some applications to know the data they changed is on stable storage on return from a system call. The Intent Log holds records of those system calls and they are replayed if the system power fails or panics if they have not been committed to the main pool. When the Intent Log is allocated from the main pool, it allocates blocks that chain through the pool. This version adds the capability to specify a separate Intent Log device or devices.

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 68

Solaris 10 10/08 release

The related bug for the version 7 change is:

6339640 Make ZIL use NVRAM when available

ZFS Pool Version 6

This version includes support for the following feature:

'bootfs' pool property

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 62

Solaris 10 10/08 release

The related bugs for version 6 changes are as follows:

4929890 ZFS boot support for the x86 platform

6479807 pools need properties

ZFS Pool Version 5

This version includes support for the following feature:

gzip compression for ZFS datasets

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 62

Solaris 10 10/08 release

The related bug for the version 5 changes is:

6536606 gzip compression for ZFS

ZFS Pool Version 4

This version includes support for the following feature:

zpool history

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 62

Solaris 10 8/07 release

The related bugs for version 4 changes are as follows:

6529406 zpool history needs to bump the on-disk version

6343741 want to store a command history on disk

ZFS Pool Version 3

This version includes support for the following features:

Hot spares

Double-parity RAID-Z (raidz2)

Improved RAID-Z accounting

These features are available in:

Nevada, build 42

Solaris 10 11/06 release, (build 3)

The related bugs for version 3 changes are as follows:

6405966 Hot Spare support in ZFS

6417978 double parity RAID-Z a.k.a. RAID6

6288488 du reports misleading size on RAID-Z

ZFS Pool Version 2

This version includes support for "Ditto Blocks", or replicated metadata. Due to the tree-like structure of the ZFS on-disk format, an uncorrectable error in a leaf block may be relatively benign, while an uncorrectable error in pool metadata can result in an unopenable pool. This feature introduces automatic replication of metadata (up to 3 copies of each block) independent of any underlying pool-wide redundancy. For example, on a pool with a single mirror, the most critical metadata will appear three times on each side of the mirror, for a total of six copies. This ensures that while user data may be lost due to corruption, all data in the pool will be discoverable and the pool will still be usable. This will be expanded in the future to allow user data replication on a per-dataset basis.

This feature integrated on 4/10/06 with the following bug fix:

6410698 ZFS metadata needs to be more highly replicated (ditto blocks)

This feature is available in:

Nevada, build 38

Solaris 10 10/06 release (build 09)

ZFS Pool Version 1

This is the initial ZFS on-disk format as integrated on 10/31/05. During the next six months of internal use, there were a few on-disk format changes that did not result in a version number change, but resulted in a flag day since earlier versions could not read the newer changes. The first official releases supporting this version are:

Nevada, build 36

Solaris 10 6/06 release

Earlier releases may not support this version, despite being formatted with the same on-disk number. This is due to:

6389368 fat zap should use 16k blocks (with backwards compatibility)

6390677 version number checking makes upgrades challenging

Where is harryd? -- follow-up

Nearly one year ago I've written that we build our own house. Now after a lot work is behind us, we are in and I have more time than I had in the past year. Currently I am preparing a blogpost. If you think that might has something to do with FreeNAS 8 and a benchmark, than you might be right. So... stay tuned...

A Closer Look at ZFS, Vdevs and Performance

Constantin gives here an great introduction into ZFS, vdevs and performance.

FreeNAS vs Nexentastor

I've tested the performance of FreeNAS 0.7.1 stable (Build 5127) and Nexentastor Community Edition 3.0.2. I will not dig into the different features or the details of both WebGUIs.

For the tests I've used the following hardware

Server

CPU - Intel Core2Duo E6300 - 1.8 GHz - 2 MB Cache

RAM - 2 GByte

Mainboard - Intel DG965WH

Harddisks - 3x WesternDigital WD3200 (320 GByte connected to the onboard SATA2)

Client

My good old MacBook Pro (late 2008), 4 GByte RAM, Mac OS X 10.6.3

Software
iSCSI initiator - Global SAN iSCSI initiator (4.0.0.204)
Benchmark Software - XBench

Benchmark Software - Helios LAN Test

Benchmark Software - iozone (MacPorts)

Protocols

CIFS
NFS
AFP (currently only available for FreeNAS)
iSCSI

Benchmarks
Xbench - The best out of 5 results
Helios LAN Test - 10 tests, two times, best result
iozone - options -e -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 256k -s2g -t4 -c -x

Tuning

No tuning on the Nexentastor. For FreeNAS I've enabled in the WebGUI System | Advanced | Tuning (enable tuning of some kernel variables)

CIFS
Keep in mind, I've tested CIFS with the built-in smb client of OSX. A native Windows OS might provide different results.

Tuning for FreeNAS (via WebGUI)

Services | CIFS/SMB | Settings

-> Send and Receive Buffer Size to 65535

-> Enable large read/write

-> Auxiliary parameters : max xmit = 65535

-> Auxiliary parameters : socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_SNDBUF=65535 SO_RCVBUF=65535

If you compare the CIFS results you will see that NexentaStor is slightly faster than FreeNAS

NFS
I wasn't able to get XBench to run on a FreeNAS NFS mountpoint. So you wont see any results on the XBench charts.




With the missing XBench results for FreeNAS I would say NexentaStor is here the winner. It provides slightly higher throughput rates.

AFP
NexentaStor doesn't provide this protocol. As I am a Mac user it is very useful to have a system serving data via AFP. Especially the support of FreeNAS for time machine is IMHO excellent (see my blogposts about backup and restore using FreeNAS and time machine)




FreeNAS is in this disciplin the clear winner.

iSCSI
There was also an issue to get iozone to run on a FreeNAS iSCSI target.





The iSCSI protocol shows several advantages compared to the other. It shows high throughput rates with a low latency. But it is not usable to share the LUN to several systems at the same time (it is possible with special Filesystems, I know, but I think this is not very common). With the lack of the iozone results for FreeNAS I would also say, Nexentastor is here the winner.

Overall comparisson











Conclusion
FreeNAS and Nexenta is on the performance side very much comparable. NexentaStor is slitghly faster in most of the disciplines, but the lack of AFP make them both overall equal.
FreeNAS is easy to setup and has a very clear and structured WebGUI. Nexenta has more features (e.g. built in snapshots, deduplication, etc.)

At the moment I definitely will stay with FreeNAS as the performance is comparable and I really like the integration of Time Machine via AFP.

P.S.: If you are interested in a detailed Excel-Sheet with more details, please drop me a mail harryd71 at users dot sourceforge dot net

Where is harryd?

Maybe you've recognized that I am not very active here or at the FreeNAS forum.

The reason behind this... I build together with my wife, our own house. She is the architect and there is a lot of work to do. To be honest... If you see our piece of land, you won't see too much, as the craftsmen just begun. But there is a lot of work to do behind the scenes.

The next few weeks / months will be very exciting, as we can see how our dream is built in stone and wood (and all the other materials). There is a lot of work to do for me, as I will do the whole electricity (and a few other things).

I've prepared another blogpost and I hope I'm able to finish it soon. So, please stay tuned and thanks for all your feedback!

Mac OS X system restore using time machine and FreeNAS

I'd like to show you in this post how you can recover your Mac from a time machine backup using FreeNAS. If you've set up time machine as I've described here, you should be able to do a complete system restore.

I've used a virtual machine using VirtualBox 3.2.0 on my MacMini to demonstrate this. VirtualBox supports now to install Mac OS X guests (maybe not for a very long time, AFAIK this is not allowed by Apple.)

1. If you have an issue with your system and you want to do a complete restore (or disaster recovery), please boot from the original boot DVD

2. Choose 'Restore System From Backup...' the 'Utilities' menu

3. Click 'Continue'. The next screen will show you the available sources.

4. After entering your login credentials you should see the backup source for your system

5. The next screen shows you the available backups of your system. Select the one you've want to restore

6. Select the destination disk and click 'restore' read the warning and 'continue'

7. And finally restart the system

Seeding FreeNAS 0.7.1 stable (5127)

You will find the .torrent files here -> TBP...

Please help to seed

Seeding FreeNAS 0.7 stable (4919)

You will find the .torrent files here -> TBP...

Please help to seed!

Episode about the future of FreeNAS on bsdtalk

You will find here an excellent talk with Josh Paetzel from iXsystems about the future of FreeNAS. Many thanks for this information!

The NEW Future of FreeNAS...

Olivier left me here a comment...

The FreeNAS project will continue to use FreeBSD in the future! This sounds excellent! Please read the original message on the blog and forum post.

Here is a copy of the message:

Hi all,

FreeNAS needs some big modification for removing its present limitation (one of the biggest is the non support of easly users add-ons).
We think that a full-rewriting of the FreeNAS base is needed. From this idea, we will take 2 differents paths:

• Volker will create a new project called "'OpenMediaVault" based on a GNU/Linux using all its experience acquired with all its nights and week-ends spent to improve FreeNAS during the last 2 years. He still continue to work on FreeNAS (and try to share its time with this 2 projects).
• And, a great surprise: iXsystems, a company specialized in professional FreeBSD offers to take FreeNAS under their wings as an open source community driven project. This mean that they will involve their professionals FreeBSD developers to FreeNAS! Their manpower will permit to do a full-rewriting of FreeNAS.

Personally, I come back to actively work in FreeNAS and begin to upgrade it to FreeBSD 8.0 (that is "production ready" for ZFS).

So we will see 'more' developers working on FreeNAS. Excellent!

Mac OSX Time Machine and FreeNAS 0.7

Since FreeNAS 0.7 it is easy to configure TimeMachine to use a AFP share (like Apple's Time Capsule)... Here is a short howto :-)

First step: Configure FreeNAS

-> Enable AFP

-> Configure the share

• Automatic disk discovery - Enable automatic disk dicovery
• Automatic disk discovery mode - Time Machine
  

Second Step: Configure OSX Time Machine

-> Select System Preferences -> Time Machine

-> Select Backup Disk
-> and Authenticate
Thats it!


Your FreeNAS will work now similar than a TimeCapsule. Enjoy! Details can be found here...

I've combined this with ZFS. With two clients and regular backups since two months, I have here a compression (gzip) enabled volume with 238 GByte. The compression ratio (compressratio) is at 1.24x

freenas:~# zfs get compressratio data0/timemachine
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
data0/timemachine compressratio 1.24x -


Instead of 295 GByte, only 238 GBytes are used. IMHO this is great :-)

If you want to see how to do a complete restore of your system, please see my new blogpost "Mac OS X system restore using time machine and FreeNAS"

Overview of NAS Operation Systems

• CryptoNAS (http://cryptonas.org/) - Free
• EON (http://sites.google.com/site/eonstorage/, Blog http://eonstorage.blogspot.com/) - Free
• EuroNAS (http://euronas.de/web/index.php) - Commercial
• FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/) - Free
• Napp-it (http://www.napp-it.org/) - Free
• NASLite (http://www.serverelements.com/naslite.php) - Commercial
• NexentaStor (http://www.nexenta.com/) - Commercial (Developer Edition is restricted to 4TB)
• Open-E (http://www.open-e.com/) - Commercial (Lite Version is restricted to 2TB)
• OpenFiler (http://www.openfiler.com/) - Free (Commercial support is available)
• PulsarOS (http://pulsaros.digitalplayground.at/) - Free (?), not released yet
• UnRAID (http://www.lime-technology.com) - Commercial (Basic Version is restricted to 3 Drives)

Do you have any experiences with one of those?