OpenZFS – OpenZFS For HPC Clusters
Discover how OpenZFS can provide cost-effective and reliable storage for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in this comprehensive write-up.
When you upgrade an existing FreeBSD installation to 13.1, the new OpenZFS features are not yet available to existing pools and zpool status will indicate “Some supported features are not enabled on the pool.” This is by design as it allows the administrator to determine when the pools are “upgraded”—the assumption is that users will first research the new features and determine if any features will cause any compatibility issues within their environment.
This write-up provides an overview of some of the new features in the OpenZFS 2.1 series. We’ll then discuss what to consider before upgrading your pools.
FreeBSD 13.0 shipped with OpenZFS 2.0.0 (see our article on Demystifying OpenZFS 2.0). You can see what has changed in OpenZFS since that version by perusing the OpenZFS Releases page.
In addition to a lot of bug fixes, improved man pages, performance enhancements, and some new zfs and zpoolcommands, the 2.1 series introduced three major new features:
In addition to these major features, OpenZFS 2.1 adds the following improvements:
It’s great to have access to the latest OpenZFS features, but there are a few things to consider before upgrading an OpenZFS pool. Some of these considerations apply to any pool upgrade, and some are specific to upgrading to the OpenZFS 2.1 series.
For OpenZFS 2.1 in particular, there are operating system minimums:
In a mixed environment with Linux systems, the compatible kernel versions are: 3.10 – 5.13
To answer the question “Should I upgrade to OpenZFS 2.1?”, keep in mind that once you upgrade the pool, you can’t downgrade it to an earlier pool version. Or, to put that another way: you can’t use an upgraded pool on an operating system kernel version that doesn’t understand the features provided by that version of the upgraded pool. This is primarily an issue for administrators who might want to change the operating system beneath an existing pool, whether by installing a new OS or by physically pulling the ZFS disks and putting them in a different machine with a different OS already installed.
Upgrading an OpenZFS pool makes the OpenZFS features already built into the operating system’s kernel available for use on the pool. This means that the risk to consider is whether or not this will cause any compatibility issues with other systems that may need to import that pool.
This is where you need to consider your systems:
In an ideal world, all of your systems would run the same operating system version and the latest OpenZFS version supported by that operating system. Since this is often not the reality, knowing your OS versions and which systems are integral to serving the data in your pools is important.
Going forward, the new OpenZFS compatibility property may be useful in mixed environments that require pool portability. In this case, you will want to consider which features apply to all of your systems requiring portability so that you can design your configuration.
You can always determine which features are available on your current FreeBSD version by running zpool upgrade -v | more. To learn more about these features, read man zpool-features.
To determine the current OpenZFS version, run zfs version.
zpool status will include this message in its output whenever a newer OpenZFS version is available:
Once you are ready to upgrade your pools, run zpool upgrade on the pool you wish to upgrade, or use -a to upgrade all pools on the system. The output from the command will indicate which new features were enabled on the specified pools.
Discover how OpenZFS can provide cost-effective and reliable storage for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in this comprehensive write-up.
The most common category of ZFS questions is “how should I set up my pool?” Sometimes the question ends “… using the drives I already have” and sometimes it ends with “and how many drives should I buy.” Either way, today’s article can help you make sense of your options.
OpenZFS is a cost-effective open source storage solution for Educational institutions. Learn how universities & system administrators can maximize its benefits.
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