Lost ZFS pool after upgrading to 9.1.1

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Whattteva

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Lol, I still wonder how we get so many people everyday that come in here with VM's despite the fact that the thread about "Don't run FreeNAS VM in production" is stickied in the forums.

I mean, this is TWO people with VM issues in one day!!! I guess it's like one of those "Don't open till XMas" presents. The more you warn people about it, the more it tempts them to do it.
 

Wind_freak

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Well I've been running in a VM about a year and this don't run in VM is news to me. It was build and run as physical for years and I decided to upgrade and just have this as a client in my vm giving it 10 gb of ram. Found rdm instructions how to import live disks and it all went swimingly. Only after upgrading to 9.1.1 did i have an issue and I was getting outstanding throughput and I'ld argue that it was faster than it was as a physical box.

Now I bought 3 3tb drives and I'ld be willing to build another physical box if I have to but that just seems like a waste of good physical space. Maybe there are some cases/mb combos with a smaller footprint and I will research that today.
 

Whattteva

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Well see, that's just the problem. Plenty of people had your exact same experience. Everything went swimmingly (or even better than physical system) UNTIL something went wrong. It only takes everyone that one failure for them to regret it though regardless of how many years they've managed to get it running.

It's not that it doesn't run in a VM. It's just HIGHLY discouraged because it was never designed to be run in a VM.

It's the same thing as the ECC RAM requirement really. It will run perfectly fine without ECC for years... until your RAM starts acting up more frequently, that is.
 

cyberjock

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Whattteva,

Here's a small list of why so many people don't know about the "do not run in a VM" rule. Feel free to make up your own, there is probably some truth in it.

1. Nobody reads the stickies.
2. If you've worked in Windows for years you really think that this is just a different pool to swim in. The reality is its windy as heck, torrential rains are coming down from the sky, and you think its just because you are a noob.
3. Everyone makes very very poor assumptions about how VMs work.
4. The technical manuals for ZFS says that virtualizing is a big no-no,even back with the single digit ZFS version. The two biggest no-nos were non-ECC RAM and virtualizing. But who even knows where to find them. Hint: They are damn near impossible now that Oracle owns ZFS and took all the free stuff away.
5. Virtualizing promises so much.
6. It seems to work fine on the surface.
7. The unfortunate reality is that only a handful of moderators actually read every single thread and every single post every day. Eventually you start to see patterns of what goes horribly wrong(and what goes very well). Big problems with 9.1 have been the jails(UI issues, errors with the upgrading, etc.) and the new Volume Manager(plenty of people do not want to be told that they have to stick to a small subset of optimal options for pool creation. Many people use many random drives of varying sizes while they wait for their final disks to arrive. Now you have no option to do that without the CLI. But if you wanted to learn the CLI you'd be better off using FreeBSD).

I have several topics I'd love to write presentation for. But the bottom line is that I don't expect people to read them. They'd much rather ignore the stickies(See #1), make a post and them have someone else tell them to read what they should have read to begin with.

The forum's ESXi wizard is currently in hiding (and has been for a few weeks). He's just as tired of it as I am. Wish I got paid regularly to recover data. I could get rich quickly with the number of people that get ZFS wrong.

Geeks also don't like getting told no. Look at how many people show up, have a Pentium 2 with 128MB of RAM and are upset that FreeNAS won't boot. Then they get upset with me personally because they read somewhere on some random website or youtube video(totally unaffiliated with iXsystems) that they could reuse old hardware and that they define that as old, so it had better work.

Just read that last link I posted on page 1. Those guys hated the fact that I practically told them what they were doing was completely idiotic. IMO it is. If I hired someone to build a FreeNAS server for me(for home or business) and they wanted to use RDM or non-ECC RAM, I'd fire them on the spot.

The fact that ZFS doesn't run in a VM very well and that it needs ECC RAM is a very new concept for most people(especially Windows admins). Windows users are generally more ignorant than Unix/Linux(No offense to anyone.. i've been a Windows admin for 20 years) and ECC is really more of a luxury than a necessity by just about every standard that isn't ZFS.
 

Whattteva

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I think your point on people, especially geeks, don't like getting told no is spot on.
I mean, I'd imagine a good portion of people that are doing virtualization in the first place (I can't see random Joe Average noobs running enterprise ESXi) probably think that they're one of the most experienced people in the field of virtualizing already. And you telling them that it's an idiotic thing to do probably feels like a slap to the face to them and a mortal insult to their technical credibility.

Then again, if they are as wise as they think they are, they would've already read the stickies and the warnings. Wise people, after all, don't just delve into things that they do not understand completely without first researching into the subject matter.
 

cyberjock

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I think your point on people, especially geeks, don't like getting told no is spot on.
I mean, I'd imagine a good portion of people that are doing virtualization in the first place (I can't see random Joe Average noobs running enterprise ESXi) probably think that they're one of the most experienced people in the field of virtualizing already. And you telling them that it's an idiotic thing to do probably feels like a slap to the face to them and a mortal insult to their technical credibility.

Then again, if they are as wise as they think they are, they would've already read the stickies and the warnings. Wise people, after all, don't just delve into things that they do not understand completely without first researching into the subject matter.

Exactly.

Not all virtualizers are completely clueless. I'd normally expect your average virtualizer to have a better grasp of the fundamentals than your average IT person. But we've had plenty of people that show up in the forum that claim to have 10+ years in computing, extensive experience in all the major Type-1 hypervisors and have a fit when I tell them what they are doing is wrong. Then if someone else backs me up he continues to tell us how we just don't know what we're talking about, blah blah blah.

Then they do something that amazes me.

They take that 3TB drive, split it up into 3 virtual disks that are all 1TB each, put those on FreeNAS and make a RAIDZ1 and call their data safe because they have redundancy from single disk failure. Uh, what!?
 

Whattteva

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Then they do something that amazes me.

They take that 3TB drive, split it up into 3 virtual disks that are all 1TB each, put those on FreeNAS and make a RAIDZ1 and call their data safe because they have redundancy from single disk failure. Uh, what!?
Lol, then they deserve to lose their data. I mean, at that point, it's not even "RAID" anymore. By definition, you have to have at least more than one physical disk... I mean, if that one disk goes bad, which other disk do you go for parity? lol.

I would understand random noobs doing something like that, but for an IT professional to do that, he needs to get his license revoked.
 

gpsguy

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We will probably have a new wave of user's complaining after ESXi 5.5 hits the streets in the next couple of weeks!


Sent from my phone
 

Wind_freak

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So is the rant calling everyone nOObs done?

So I'm researching parts to go physical again. This pool was built physical and imported into the VM. I may have the old stuff hanging around the house, by old I think 16 gb ram dual core 2.7 ghz.

Once Im physical again do I do those same commands and expect a different result?
 

Whattteva

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You definitely got the wrong message there. On the contrary, we generally say that most people that do go into VM are generally pretty knowledgeable already. But that often ultimately ends up becoming their downfall because they'd refuse to heed warnings despite mounting evidence against it. They also typically become pretty defensive.

Based on your post above though, you don't sound like you'd fall into that category because you're at least listening to the suggestion to go physical.
I'm not sure if you'd be able to recover the data, but running those commands again would definitely help to troubleshoot it.

As far as hardware goes, that's pretty awesome for being "old" actually.
 

cyberjock

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So is the rant calling everyone nOObs done?

So I'm researching parts to go physical again. This pool was built physical and imported into the VM. I may have the old stuff hanging around the house, by old I think 16 gb ram dual core 2.7 ghz.

Once Im physical again do I do those same commands and expect a different result?

What commands are you referring to? I haven't seen any commands in this thread to fix your issue. I know that the fix will require you to recreate the GPT table, but I can't help you with those steps right now. Got alot of my own FreeNAS stuff planned and I'm helping someone else. FlynnVT would be the guy I'd love to see help you. He's more familiar with the process to attempt to repair your specific issue. I might be able to help you Tuesday or so of next week if he hasn't posted by then.

I agree with Whattteva though. The fact that you are trying to get away fro virtualized FreeNAS shows that you aren't in the category of people I've been talking about. Those people are generally stubborn and refuse to accept that not everything should be virtualized.
 

cyberjock

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Hey Wind_freak, can you send me a PM with your email. I'll try to help you with your problem one-on-one. I can't make any guarantees either, but I'll give it my best effort.
 
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