Transitioning from Windows ReFS to FreeNAS ZFS

[slugg]

I'm not sure if this should be in the storage forum, or here... I'm thinking here.

I have a Windows server with a ReFS storage pool. I really want to set up an NFS share for higher throughput than SMB, but Microsoft's half-baked solution doesn't support NFS on the ReFS file system. That makes no sense to me, but whatever.

So here's the deal. I'm looking for a way keep my data and transition everything over to FreeNAS. Please forgive me if I say something stupid, as I really don't know what I'm doing here. 🙂 What I'm thinking so far is the following (see my questions in bold):

From the Windows side:

• Remove one of the three disks from the pool (2 out of 3 disks remaining, so it should work)
• Format it to ext3 using third party tools
• Copy all the contents from the pool to the ext3 disk

And then from the FreeNAS side:

• Set up FreeNAS using the two remaining disks that Windows was using. I would assume this would then be considered a ZFS mirrored setup - is that correct?
• Copy the contents of the ext3 disk to the new ZFS array
• Convert the two-disk ZFS mirrored into a 3 disk parity setup... is this possible?

Does my plan make sense? Is there a better way to do this? Is there anything else I need to know?

Thanks in advance! 🙂

 

[jhu]

I'm not sure if this should be in the storage forum, or here... I'm thinking here.

I have a Windows server with a ReFS storage pool. I really want to set up an NFS share for higher throughput than SMB, but Microsoft's half-baked solution doesn't support NFS on the ReFS file system. That makes no sense to me, but whatever.

So here's the deal. I'm looking for a way keep my data and transition everything over to FreeNAS. Please forgive me if I say something stupid, as I really don't know what I'm doing here. 🙂 What I'm thinking so far is the following (see my questions in bold):

From the Windows side:

• Remove one of the three disks from the pool (2 out of 3 disks remaining, so it should work)
• Format it to ext3 using third party tools
• Copy all the contents from the pool to the ext3 disk

And then from the FreeNAS side:

• Set up FreeNAS using the two remaining disks that Windows was using. I would assume this would then be considered a ZFS mirrored setup - is that correct?
• Copy the contents of the ext3 disk to the new ZFS array

Everything looks good. Up until...

• Convert the two-disk ZFS mirrored into a 3 disk parity setup... is this possible?

Does my plan make sense? Is there a better way to do this? Is there anything else I need to know?

Thanks in advance! 🙂

No, that will not work. The only way is to copy everything to a 4th drive, make a RAID-Z with the three original disks, then copy the data onto the RAID-Z.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Convert the two-disk ZFS mirrored into a 3 disk parity setup... is this possible?

As jhu said, absolutely not.

Once a ZFS vdev has been set-up, it is IMMUTABLE with the single exception, that one may convert a single drive vdev to a mirror.

Set up FreeNAS using the two remaining disks that Windows was using. I would assume this would then be considered a ZFS mirrored setup - is that correct?

You could set them in up in one of two ways. In ZFS, redundancy is taken care of at the level of vdevs, and data is dynamically striped across all vdevs. You COULD have each drive as its own, non-redundant, vdev, and later, convert each non-redundant vdev to a mirror (for a raid-10-like set-up). Or, you could set the two drive up as a single, mirror, vdev.

Does my plan make sense? Is there a better way to do this? Is there anything else I need to know?

Could you give some more details about your exact set-up (how much data are you using, what is the capacity of the drives in question, etc)? It might be easier to give you good advice or suggestions if we knew that.

 

[tomt4535]

If you have a backup of the data, you could restore it from the last backup. If not, a 4th disk is probably your best bet.

 

[slugg]

Okay. So I decided the trouble wasn't worth it and I just borrowed a drive to facilitate a simple transfer. No fuss. I just copied it to the spare drive, installed the FreeNAS setup, and copied it back over.

There were some hiccups with the FreeNAS setup, but hey, I learned a thing or two. Everything is running great now. 🙂

 

[marialuiza]

why dont you just contact any service provider around you

 

[slugg]

why dont you just contact any service provider around you

Uh... What?