ansible-nas/docs/zfs/zfs_configuration.md

This text deals with specific ZFS configuration questions for Ansible-NAS. If you are new to ZFS and are looking for the big picture, please read the ZFS overview introduction first.

Just so there is no misunderstanding

Unlike other NAS variants, Ansible-NAS does not install, configure or manage the disks or file systems for you. It doesn't care which file system you use - ZFS, Btrfs, XFS or EXT4, take your pick. Nor does it provides a mechanism for snapshots or disk monitoring. As Tony Stark said to Loki in Avengers: It's all on you.

However, Ansible-NAS has traditionally been used with the powerful ZFS filesystem. Since out of the box support for ZFS on Linux with Ubuntu is comparatively new, this text shows how to set up a simple storage configuration. To paraphrase Nick Fury from Winter Soldier: We do share. We're nice like that.

Using ZFS for Docker containers is currently not covered by this document. See the official Docker ZFS documentation instead.

The obligatory warning

We take no responsibility for any bad thing that might happen if you follow this guide. We strongly suggest you test these procedures in a virtual machine first. Always, always, always backup your data.

The basic setup

For this example, we're assuming two identical spinning rust hard drives for Ansible-NAS storage. These two drives will be mirrored to provide redundancy. The actual Ubuntu system will be on a different drive and is not our concern.

Root on ZFS is still a hassle for Ubuntu. If that changes, this document might be updated accordingly. Until then, don't ask us about it.

The Ubuntu kernel is already ready for ZFS. We only need the utility package which we install with sudo apt install zfsutils.

Creating a pool

We assume you don't mind totally destroying whatever data might be on your two storage drives, have used a tool such as gparted to remove any existing partitions, and have installed a new GPT partition table on each drive. To create our ZFS pool, we will use a command in this form:

        sudo zpool create -o ashift=<ASHIFT> <NAME> mirror <DRIVE1> <DRIVE2>

The options from simple to complex are:

NAME: ZFS pools traditionally take their names from characters in the The Matrix. The two most common are tank and dozer. Whatever you use, it should be short - think ash, not xenomorph.

DRIVES: The Linux command lsblk will give you a quick overview of the hard drives in the system. However, we don't pass the drive specification in the format /dev/sde because this is not persistent. Instead, always use the output of ls /dev/disk/by-id/ to find the drives' IDs.

ASHIFT: This is required to pass the sector size of the drive to ZFS for optimal performance. You might have to do this by hand because some drives lie: Whereas modern drives have 4k sector sizes (or 8k for many SSDs), they will report 512 bytes because Windows XP can't handle 4k sectors. ZFS tries to catch the liars and use the correct value. However, this sometimes fails, and you have to add it by hand.

The ashift value is a power of two, so we have 9 for 512 bytes, 12 for 4k, and 13 for 8k. You can create a pool without this parameter and then use zdb -C | grep ashift to see what ZFS generated automatically. If it isn't what you think, destroy the pool again and add it manually.

In our pretend case, we use two 3 TB WD Red drives. Listing all drives by ID gives us something like this, but with real serial numbers:

        ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCCFAKESN01
        ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCCFAKESN02

WD Reds have a 4k sector size. The actual command to create the pool would then be:

        sudo zpool create -o ashift=12 tank mirror ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCCFAKESN01 ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCCFAKESN02

Our new pool is named tank and is mirrored. To see information about it, use zpool status tank (no sudo necessary). If you screwed up (usually with ashift), use sudo zpool destroy tank and start over now before it's too late.

Pool default parameters

Setting pool-wide default parameters makes life easier when we create our filesystems. To see them all, you can use the command zfs get all tank. Most are perfectly sensible, some you'll want to change:

        sudo zfs set atime=off tank
        sudo zfs set compression=lz4 tank
        sudo zfs set autoexpand=on tank

The atime parameter means that your system updates a time stamp every time a file is accessed, which uses a lot of resources. Usually, you don't care. Compression is a no-brainer on modern CPUs and should be on by default (we will discuss exceptions for compressed media files later). The autoexpand lets the pool grow when you add larger hard drives.

Creating filesystems

To actually store the data, we need filesystems (also known as "datasets"). For our very simple default Ansible-NAS setup, we will create two: One filesystem for movies (movies_root in all.yml) and one for downloads (downloads_root).

Movies (and other large, pre-compressed files)

We first create the basic filesystem:

        sudo zfs create tank/movies

Movie files are usually rather large, already in a compressed format and for security reasons, the files stored there shouldn't be executable. We change the properties of the filesystem accordingly:

        sudo zfs set recordsize=1M tank/movies
        sudo zfs set compression=off tank/movies
        sudo zfs set exec=off tank/movies

The recordsize here is set to the currently largest possible value to increase performance and save storage. Recall that we used ashift during the creation of the pool to match the ZFS block size with the drives' sector size. Records are created out of these blocks. Having larger records reduces the amount of metadata that is required, because various parts of ZFS such as caching and checksums work on this level.

Compression is unnecessary for movie files because they are usually in a compressed format anyway. ZFS is good about recognizing this, and so if you happen to leave compression on as the default for the pool, it won't make much of a difference.

By default, ZFS stores pools directly under the root directory. Also, the filesystems don't have to be listed in /etc/fstab to be mounted. This means that our filesystem will appear as /tank/movies if you don't change anything. We need to change the line in all.yml accordingly:

        movies_root: "/tank/movies"

You can also set a traditional mount point if you wish with the mountpoint property. Setting this to none prevents the file system from being automatically mounted at all.

The filesystems for TV shows, music files and podcasts - all large, pre-compressed files - should probably take the exact same parameters.

Downloads

For downloads, we can leave most of the default parameters the way they are.

        sudo zfs create tank/downloads
        sudo zfs set exec=off tank/downloads

The recordsize stays the 128 KB default. In all.yml, the new line is

        downloads_root: "/tank/downloads"

Other data

Depending on the use case, you might want to create and tune more filesystems. For example, Bit Torrent, MySQL and Virtual Machines all have known best configurations.

Setting up scrubs

On Ubuntu, scrubs are configured out of the box to run on the second Sunday of every month. See /etc/cron.d/zfsutils-linux to change this.

Email notifications

To have the ZFS demon zed send you emails when there is trouble, you first have to install an email agent such as postfix. In the file /etc/zfs/zed.d/zed.rc, change the three entries:

ZED_EMAIL_ADDR=<YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS_HERE>
ZED_NOTIFY_INTERVAL_SECS=3600
ZED_NOTIFY_VERBOSE=1

If zed is not enabled, you might have to run systemctl enable zed. You can test the setup by manually starting a scrub with sudo zpool scrub tank.

Setting up automatic snapshots

See sanoid as a tool for snapshot management.