Category: Ubuntu

Could not complete SSL handshake, Socket timeout after 10 seconds with Nagios and NSClient++ 0.4x

Adding a couple of new Windows hosts to my monitoring network this morning, my NRPE plugin checks against them were failing.

me@nagios:~$ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H monitoredwindowsserver.vpn
CHECK_NRPE: Error - could not complete SSL handshake.

The usual culprits – password set but not being used, or hosts_allowed not including the host doing the checking – were already set correctly.

Turns out the NSClient++ folks changed up the default configs. In order to get it working again with a relatively vanilla Nagios server on the other end, I needed to set two new directives under [/settings/NRPE/server]:

verify mode = none
insecure = true

With those directives set and a restart to the nsclient service on the Windows end, manual tests to NRPE worked properly:

me@nagios:~$ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H monitoredwindowsserver.vpn
I (0.4.4.19 2015-12-08) seem to be doing fine...

One of these days I should figure out how to get the default modes, which use peer-to-peer certificate checks, working… but for the moment, I’m only allowing traffic over a VPN tunnel anyway, so it was more important to get it working in its existing (secured by VPN) configuration than to blow a few hours untangling the new defaults.

Wasn’t out of the woods yet, though – that got NRPE working, but not NSClientServer, which is what I’m actually using to monitor these Windows hosts for the most part. So I was still seeing “CRITICAL – Socket timeout after 10 seconds” on a lot of tests against the new hosts in Nagios. Doing a netstat -an on the Windows hosts themselves showed that they were listening on 5666 – the NRPE port – but nothing was listening on 12489, the NSClientServer port. This required another fix in the nsclient.ini file. Just underneath [/modules], you’ll need to add (not just uncomment!) this line:

NSClientServer = enabled

And restart the NSClient++ service again, either from Services applet or with net stop nscp ; net start nscp. Now we test the check_nt plugin against the host…

me@nagios:~$ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nt -H monitoredwindowsserver.vpn -v UPTIME -p 12489
System Uptime - 0 day(s) 1 hour(s) 34 minute(s)

Now, finally, all of my tests are working. Hope this saves somebody else from having the kind of morning I had!

ZFS: Practicing failures on virtual hardware

I always used to sweat, and sweat bullets, when it came time to replace a failed disk in ZFS. It happened infrequently enough that I never did remember the syntax quite right in between issues, and the last thing you want to do with production hardware and data is fumble around in a cold sweat – you want to know what the correct syntax for everything is ahead of time, and be practiced and confident.

Wonderfully, there’s no reason for that anymore – particularly on Linux, which boasts a really excellent set of tools for simulating storage hardware quickly and easily. So today, we’re going to walk through setting up a pool, destroying one of the disks in it, and recovering from the failure. The important part here isn’t really the syntax for the replacement, though… it’s learning how to set up the simulation in the first place, which allows you to test lots of things properly when your butt isn’t on the line!

Prerequisites

Obviously, you need to have ZFS available. If you’re on Ubuntu Xenial, you can get it with apt update ; apt install zfs-linux. If you’re on an earlier version of Ubuntu, you’ll need to add the zfs-native PPA from the ZFS on Linux project, and install from there: apt-add-repository ppa:zfs-native/stable ; apt update ; apt install ubuntu-zfs.

You’ll also need the QEMU tools, to create and manage .qcow2 storage files, and qemu-nbd loopback type devices that access them like real hardware. Again on Ubuntu, that’s apt update ; apt install qemu-utils.

If you aren’t running Ubuntu, the tools are definitely still available, but you’ll need to consult your own distro’s documentation / forums / etc to figure out how to install ’em.

Creating the virtual disk back-end

First up, we create the back end files for the storage. In today’s example, that’ll be a pair of 1GB disks.

root@banshee:~# qemu-img create -f qcow2 /tmp/0.qcow2 1G ; qemu-img create -f qcow2 /tmp/1.qcow2 1G
Formatting '/tmp/0.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 encryption=off cluster_size=65536 lazy_refcounts=off 
Formatting '/tmp/1.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 encryption=off cluster_size=65536 lazy_refcounts=off

That does exactly what it looks like: creates a pair of 1GB virtual disks, /tmp/0.qcow2 and /tmp/1.qcow2. Qcow2 files are sparsely allocated, so they don’t actually take up any room at all yet – they’ll expand as and if you put data in them. (If you omit the -f qcow2 argument, qemu-img will create fully allocated RAW files instead, which will take longer.)

Creating the virtual disk devices

By themselves, our .qcow2 files don’t help us much. In order to use them as disks with ZFS, what we really need are block devices, in the /dev filesystem, which reference our qcow2 files. That’s where qemu-nbd comes in.

root@banshee:~# modprobe nbd max_part=63

You might or might not actually need that bit – but it never hurts. This makes sure the nbd kernel module is loaded, and, for safety’s sake, that it won’t try to load more than 63 partitions on a single virtual device. This might keep your system from crashing if you try to access a stupendously corrupt or maliciously crafted qcow2 file – I’m not sure what happens if a system thinks it has devices sda1 through sda65537, and I’d really rather not find out!

root@banshee:~# qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /tmp/0.qcow2 ; qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd1 /tmp/1.qcow2

Easy peasy – we now have virtual disks /dev/nbd0 and /dev/nbd1, which can be accessed by ZFS (or any other filesystem or linux system utility) just like any other disk would be.

Setting up a zpool

This looks just like setting up any other pool. We’ll use the ashift argument to make the pool use 4K blocks, since that matches my underlying block device (which might or might not really matter, but it’s a good habit to get into anyway, and this is all about building good habits and muscle memory, right?)

root@banshee:~# zpool create -oashift=12 test mirror /dev/nbd0 /dev/nbd1
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Easy peasy! We now have a pool with a simple two-disk mirror vdev.

Playing with topology: add more devices

What if we wanted to make it a pool of mirrors, with a second mirror vdev?

root@banshee:~# qemu-img create -f qcow2 /tmp/2.qcow2 1G ; qemu-img create -f qcow2 /tmp/3.qcow2 1G
Formatting '/tmp/2.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 encryption=off cluster_size=65536 lazy_refcounts=off 
Formatting '/tmp/3.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 encryption=off cluster_size=65536 lazy_refcounts=off 
root@banshee:~# qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd2 /tmp/2.qcow2 ; qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd3 /tmp/3.qcow2
root@banshee:~# zpool add -oashift=12 test mirror /dev/nbd2 /dev/nbd3
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Couldn’t be easier.

Save some data on your new virtual hardware

Before we do anything else, let’s store some data on the new pool, so that we have something to detect corruption on later. (ZFS doesn’t checksum or scrub empty blocks, so won’t find corruption in them.)

root@banshee:~# pv < /dev/urandom > /test/urandom.bin
 408MB 0:00:37 [  15MB/s] [                                          <=>                    ]
^C

I used the pipe viewer utility here, pv, which is available on Ubuntu with apt update ; apt install pv.

The ^C is because I hit control-C to interrupt it once I felt that I’d written enough data. In this case, a bit over 400MB of random data, saved on our new pool in the file /test/urandom.bin.

root@banshee:~# zpool list test
NAME   SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
test  1.97G   414M  1.56G         -    26%    20%  1.00x  ONLINE  -

root@banshee:~# zfs list test
NAME   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
test   413M  1.50G   413M  /test

root@banshee:~# ls -lh /test
total 413M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 413M May 16 12:12 urandom.bin

Gravy.

I just want to kill something beautiful

What happens if a drive or a controller port goes berserk, and overwrites large swathes of a disk with zeroes? No time like the present to find out!

We don’t really want to write directly over a .qcow2 file, since our goal today is to test ZFS, not to test the QEMU infrastructure itself. We want to write to the actual device we created, and let the device put the data in the .qcow2 file. Let’s pick on /dev/nbd0, backed by /tmp/0.qcow2 – it looks uppity and in need of some comeuppance.

root@banshee:~# pv < /dev/zero > /dev/nbd0
 777MB 0:00:06 [48.9MB/s] [       <=>                                                     ]
^C

Boom. Errors galore. Does ZFS know about them yet?

root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Nope! We really, really did simulate on-disk corruption, which ZFS has no way of knowing about until it tries to actually access the data.

Easter egging for errors

So, let’s actually access the data by reading in the entire /test/urandom.bin file, and then check our status:

root@banshee:~# pv < /test/urandom.bin > /dev/null
 412MB 0:00:00 [6.99GB/s] [=============================================>] 100%            
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Hey – still nothing! Why not? Because /test/urandom.qcow2 is still in the ARC, that’s why! ZFS didn’t actually need to hit the storage to hand us the file, so it didn’t – and we still haven’t detected the massive amount of corruption we injected into /dev/nbd0.

We can get ZFS to actually look for the problem in a couple of ways. The cruder way is to export the pool and reimport it, which will have the side effect of dumping the ARC as well. The more professional way is to scrub the pool, which is a technique with the explicit design of reading and verifying every block. But first, let’s see what happens just reading from the storage normally, after the ARC isn’t holding the data anymore:

root@banshee:~# zpool export test
root@banshee:~# zpool import test
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
	attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
	using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
  scan: none requested
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0     4
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Ooh, we’ve already found a few errors – we injected so much corruption that we nailed a few of ZFS’ metadata blocks on /dev/nbd0, which were found immediately on importing the pool again. There were redundant copies of the metadata blocks available, though, so ZFS repaired the errors it found already with those.

Now that we’ve exported and imported the pool, which also dumped the ARC, let’s re-read the file in its entirety again, then see what our status looks like:

root@banshee:~# pv < /test/urandom.bin > /dev/null
 412MB 0:00:00 [ 563MB/s] [================================================>] 100%            
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
	attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
	using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
  scan: none requested
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0     9
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Five more blocks detected corrupt. Doesn’t seem like a lot, does it? Keep in mind, ZFS is only finding blocks that we specifically attempt to read from right now – so a lot of what would be corrupt blocks on /dev/nbd0, we actually read from /dev/nbd1 instead. And only half-ish of the data was saved to mirror-0 in the first place – the rest went to mirror-1. So, ZFS is finding and repairing corrupt blocks… but only a few of them so far. This was worth playing with to see what happens with undetected errors in normal use, but now that we’ve done this, let’s look for errors the right way.

It isn’t really clean until it’s been scrubbed

When we scrub the pool, we explicitly read every single block that’s been written and is actively in use on every single device, all at once.

So far, we’ve found nine corrupt blocks just poking around the system like we normally would in normal use. Will a scrub find more?

root@banshee:~# zpool scrub test
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error.  An
	attempt was made to correct the error.  Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
	using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
  scan: scrub repaired 170M in 0h0m with 0 errors on Mon May 16 12:32:00 2016
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0 1.40K
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

There we go! We just went from 9 checksum errors, to 1.4 thousand checksum errors detected.

And that, folks, is why you want to regularly scrub your pool.

Can we do worse? What happens if we blow through every block on /dev/nbd0, instead of “just” 3/4 or so of them?

root@banshee:~# pv < /dev/zero > /dev/nbd0
pv: write failed: No space left on device<=>                                                 ]
root@banshee:~# zpool scrub test
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices could not be used because the label is missing or
	invalid.  Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue
	functioning in a degraded state.
action: Replace the device using 'zpool replace'.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-4J
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0h0m with 0 errors on Mon May 16 12:36:38 2016
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    UNAVAIL      0     0 1.40K  corrupted data
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

The CKSUM column hasn’t changed – but /dev/nbd0 now shows as UNAVAIL, with the corrupted data flag, because we blew through all the metadata including all copies of the disk label itself. We still have no data errors on the pool itself, but mirror-0, and the pool itself, are operating degraded now. Which we’ll want to fix.

Interestingly, we also just found a bug in ZFS – the pool itself as well as the mirror-0 vdev, should be showing DEGRADED in the STATE column, not ONLINE! I’m gonna go report that, be back in a minute…

Replacing a failed disk (Rise chicken. Chicken, rise.)

OK, now that we’ve thoroughly failed a disk, we can replace it. We happen to know – because we’re evil bastards who did it ourselves – that the actual disk itself is fine on the hardware level, we just basically degaussed it. So we could just replace it in the array in situ. That’s not usually going to be best practice with real hardware, though, so let’s more thoroughly simulate actually removing and replacing the disk with a new one.

First, the removal:

root@banshee:~# qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
/dev/nbd0 disconnected

Simple enough. ZFS doesn’t really know the disk is gone yet, but we can force it to figure out by scrubbing again before checking the status:

root@banshee:~# zpool scrub test
root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be used because the label is missing or
	invalid.  Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue
	functioning in a degraded state.
action: Replace the device using 'zpool replace'.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-4J
  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0h0m with 0 errors on Mon May 16 12:42:35 2016
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        DEGRADED     0     0     0
	  mirror-0  DEGRADED     0     0     0
	    nbd0    UNAVAIL      0     0 1.40K  corrupted data
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Interestingly, now that we’ve actually removed /dev/nbd0 in a hardware sense, our pool and vdev show – correctly – as DEGRADED, in the actual STATUS column as well as in the status message.

Regardless, now that we’ve “pulled” the disk, let’s “replace” it.

root@banshee:~# rm /tmp/0.qcow2
root@banshee:~# qemu-img create -f qcow2 /tmp/0.qcow2 1G
Formatting '/tmp/0.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 size=1073741824 encryption=off cluster_size=65536 lazy_refcounts=off 
root@banshee:~# qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /tmp/0.qcow2

Easy enough – now, we’re in exactly the same boat we’d be in if this was a real machine and we’d physically removed and replaced the offending drive, but done nothing else. ZFS, of course, is still going to show degraded status – we need to give the new drive to the pool, as well as physically plugging it in. So let’s do that:

root@banshee:~# zpool replace test /dev/nbd0

Is it really that easy? Let’s check the status and find out:

root@banshee:~# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
  scan: resilvered 206M in 0h0m with 0 errors on Mon May 16 12:47:20 2016
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd0    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd1    ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd2    ONLINE       0     0     0
	    nbd3    ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Yep, it really is that easy.

Party’s over: clean up before you go home

Now that you’ve successfully tested what you set out to test, the last step is to clean up your virtual mess. In order, you need to destroy the test pool, disconnect the virtual devices, and delete the back-end storage files they referenced.

root@banshee:~# zpool destroy test
root@banshee:~# qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0 ; qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd1 ; qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd2 ; qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd3
/dev/nbd0 disconnected
/dev/nbd1 disconnected
/dev/nbd2 disconnected
/dev/nbd3 disconnected
root@banshee:~# rm /tmp/0.qcow2 ; rm /tmp/1.qcow2 ; rm /tmp/2.qcow2 ; rm /tmp/3.qcow2

All done – clean as a whistle, and ready to set up the next simulation!

If you learned how to fail out a disk, awesome, but…

If you ended up here trying to figure out how to deal with and replace a failed disk, cool, and I hope you got what you were looking for. But please, remember the testing steps we did for the environment – they’re what this post is actually about. Learning how to set up your own virtual test environment will make you a much, much better admin down the line – and make you as cool as an action hero that one fateful day when it’s a real disk that’s faulted out of your real pool, and your data’s on the line. Nothing gives you confidence and takes away the stress like plenty of experience having done the exact same thing before.

Testing copies=n resiliency

I decided to see how well ZFS copies=n would stand up to on-disk corruption today. Spoiler alert: not great.

First step, I created a 1GB virtual disk, made a zpool out of it with 8K blocks, and set copies=2.

me@locutus:~$ sudo qemu-img create -f qcow2 /data/test/copies/0.qcow2 1G
me@locutus:~$ sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /data/test/copies/0.qcow2 1G
me@locutus:~$ sudo zpool create -oashift=12 test /data/test/copies/0.qcow2
me@locutus:~$ sudo zfs set copies=2 test

Now, I wrote 400 1MB files to it – just enough to make the pool roughly 85% full, including the overhead due to copies=2.

me@locutus:~$ cat /tmp/makefiles.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

for ($x=0; $x<400 ; $x++) {
	print "dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1 of=$x\n";
	print `dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1 of=$x`;
}

With the files written, I backed up my virtual filesystem, fully populated, so I can repeat the experiment later.

me@locutus:~$ sudo zpool export test
me@locutus:~$ sudo cp /data/test/copies/0.qcow2 /data/test/copies/0.qcow2.bak
me@locutus:~$ sudo zpool import test

Now, I write corrupt blocks to 10% of the filesystem. (Roughly: it's possible that the same block was overwritten with a garbage block more than once.) Note that I used a specific seed, so that I can recreate the scenario exactly, for more runs later.

me@locutus:~$ cat /tmp/corruptor.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

# total number of blocks in the test filesystem
$numblocks=131072;

# desired percentage corrupt blocks
$percentcorrupt=.1;

# so we write this many corrupt blocks
$corruptloop=$numblocks*$percentcorrupt;

# consistent results for testing
srand 32767;

# generate 8K of garbage data
for ($x=0; $x<8*1024; $x++) {
	$garbage .= chr(int(rand(256)));
}

open FH, "> /dev/nbd0";

for ($x=0; $x<$corruptloop; $x++) {
	$blocknum = int(rand($numblocks-100));
	print "Writing garbage data to block $blocknum\n";
	seek FH, ($blocknum*8*1024), 0;
	print FH $garbage;
}

close FH;

Okay. When I scrub the filesystem I just wrote those 10,000 or so corrupt blocks to, what happens?

me@locutus:~$ sudo zpool scrub test ; sudo zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an error resulting in data
	corruption.  Applications may be affected.
action: Restore the file in question if possible.  Otherwise restore the
	entire pool from backup.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-8A
  scan: scrub repaired 133M in 0h1m with 1989 errors on Mon May  9 15:56:11 2016
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0 1.94K
	  nbd0      ONLINE       0     0 8.94K

errors: 1989 data errors, use '-v' for a list
me@locutus:~$ sudo zpool status -v test | grep /test/ | wc -l
385

OUCH. 385 of my 400 total files were still corrupt after the scrub! Copies=2 didn't do a great job for me here. 🙁

What if I try it again, this time just writing garbage to 1% of the blocks on disk, not 10%? First, let's restore that backup I cleverly made:

root@locutus:/data/test/copies# zpool export test
root@locutus:/data/test/copies# qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0
/dev/nbd0 disconnected
root@locutus:/data/test/copies# pv < 0.qcow2.bak > 0.qcow2
 999MB 0:00:00 [1.63GB/s] [==================================>] 100%            
root@locutus:/data/test/copies# qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /data/test/copies/0.qcow2
root@locutus:/data/test/copies# zpool import test
root@locutus:/data/test/copies# zpool status test | tail -n 5
	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  nbd0      ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Alright, now let's change $percentcorrupt from 0.1 to 0.01, and try again. How'd we do after only corrupting 1% of the blocks on disk?

root@locutus:/data/test/copies# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an error resulting in data
	corruption.  Applications may be affected.
action: Restore the file in question if possible.  Otherwise restore the
	entire pool from backup.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-8A
  scan: scrub repaired 101M in 0h0m with 72 errors on Mon May  9 16:13:49 2016
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0    72
	  nbd0      ONLINE       0     0 1.08K

errors: 64 data errors, use '-v' for a list
root@locutus:/data/test/copies# zpool status test -v | grep /test/ | wc -l
64

Still not great. We lost 64 out of our 400 files. Tenth of a percent?

root@locutus:/data/test/copies# zpool status -v test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an error resulting in data
	corruption.  Applications may be affected.
action: Restore the file in question if possible.  Otherwise restore the
	entire pool from backup.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-8A
  scan: scrub repaired 12.1M in 0h0m with 2 errors on Mon May  9 16:22:30 2016
config:

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test        ONLINE       0     0     2
	  nbd0      ONLINE       0     0   105

errors: Permanent errors have been detected in the following files:

        /test/300
        /test/371

Damn. We still lost two files, even with only writing 130 or so corrupt blocks. (The missing 26 corrupt blocks weren't picked up by the scrub because they happened in the 15% or so of unused space on the pool, presumably: a scrub won't check unused blocks.) OK, what if we try a control - how about we corrupt the same tenth of a percent of the filesystem (105 blocks or so), this time without copies=2 set? To make it fair, I wrote 800 1MB files to the same filesystem this time using the default copies=1 - this is more files, but it's the same percentage of the filesystem full. (Interestingly, this went a LOT faster. Perceptibly, more than twice as fast, I think, although I didn't actually time it.)

Now with our still 84% full /test zpool, but this time with copies=1, I corrupted the same 0.1% of the total block count.

root@locutus:/data/test/copies# zpool status test
  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an error resulting in data
	corruption.  Applications may be affected.
action: Restore the file in question if possible.  Otherwise restore the
	entire pool from backup.
   see: http://zfsonlinux.org/msg/ZFS-8000-8A
  scan: scrub repaired 8K in 0h0m with 98 errors on Mon May  9 16:28:26 2016
config:

	NAME                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	test                         ONLINE       0     0    98
	  /data/test/copies/0.qcow2  ONLINE       0     0   198

errors: 93 data errors, use '-v' for a list

Without copies=2 set, we lost 93 files instead of 2. So copies=n was definitely better than nothing for our test of writing 0.1% of the filesystem as bad blocks... but it wasn't fabulous, either, and it fell flat on its face with 1% or 10% of the filesystem corrupted. By comparison, a truly redundant pool - one with two disks in it, in a mirror vdev - would have survived the same test (corrupting ANY number of blocks on a single disk) with flying colors.

The TL;DR here is that copies=n is better than nothing... but not by a long shot, and you do give up a lot of performance for it. Conclusion: play with it if you like, but limit it only to extremely important data, and don't make the mistake of thinking it's any substitute for device redundancy, much less backups.

FIO cheat sheet

With any luck I’ll turn this into a real blog post soon, but for the moment: a cheat sheet for simple usage of fio to benchmark storage. This command will run 16 simultaneous 4k random writers in sync mode. It’s a big enough config to push through the ZIL on most zpools and actually do some testing of the real hardware underneath the cache.

fio --name=random-writers --ioengine=sync --iodepth=4 --rw=randwrite --bs=4k --direct=0 --size=256m --numjobs=16 --end_fsync=1

For reference, a Sanoid Standard host with two 1TB solid state pro mirror vdevs gets 429MB/sec throughput with 16 4k random writers in sync mode:

Run status group 0 (all jobs):
  WRITE: io=4096.0MB, aggrb=426293KB/s, minb=26643KB/s, maxb=28886KB/s, mint=9075msec, maxt=9839msec

Awww, yeah.

378MB/sec for a single 4k random writer, so don’t think you have to have a ridiculous queue depth to see outstanding throughput, either:

Run status group 0 (all jobs):
  WRITE: io=4096.0MB, aggrb=378444KB/s, minb=378444KB/s, maxb=378444KB/s, mint=11083msec, maxt=11083msec

That’s a spicy meatball.

A note from the future: to do a 50% mix of reads and writes:

fio --name=random-readwrite --ioengine=sync --iodepth=4 --rw=randrw --bs=4k --direct=0 --size=256m --numjobs=16 --end_fsync=1

Emoji on Ubuntu Trusty

OK, so this is maybe kinda useless. But I wanted an emoji ONCE for a presentation, and the ONCE I wanted it, the fool thing wouldn’t display on my presentation laptop and I had to scramble at the last minute to do something that wasn’t quite as entertaining. So here’s how you fix that problem:

you@box:~$ sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install ttf-ancient-fonts unifont

Poof, you got emojis. In my case, the one I wanted was this:

?

Yes, I AM comfortable in my masculinity, why do you ask…?

Nagios initial configuration / NSClient++ / check_nt

A note to my future self:

Not ALL of the configs for a newly installed Nagios server are in /etc/nagios3/conf.d. Some of them are in /etc/nagios-plugins/config. In particular, the configuration for the raw check_nt command is in there, and it’s a little buggy. You’ll need to specify the correct port, and you’ll need to make it pass more than one argument along.

This is the commented-out dist definition of check_nt, followed by the correct way to define check_nt:

# 'check_nt' command definition
#define command {
# command_name check_nt
# command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nt -H '$HOSTADDRESS$' -v '$ARG1$'
#}

define command {
command_name check_nt
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nt -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -p 12489 -v '$ARG1$' '$ARG2$'
}

You’re welcome, future self. You’re welcome.

Reshuffling pool storage on the fly

If you’re new here:

Sanoid is an open-source storage management project, built on top of the OpenZFS filesystem and Linux KVM hypervisor, with the aim of providing affordable, open source, enterprise-class hyperconverged infrastructure. Most of what we’re talking about today boils down to “managing ZFS storage” – although Sanoid’s replication management tool Syncoid does make the operation a lot less complicated.

Recently, I deployed two Sanoid appliances to a new customer in Raleigh, NC.

When the customer specced out their appliances, their plan was to deploy one production server and one offsite DR server – and they wanted to save a little money, so the servers were built out differently. Production had two SSDs and six conventional disks, but offsite DR just had eight conventional disks – not like DR needs a lot of IOPS performance, right?

Well, not so right. When I got onsite, I discovered that the “disaster recovery” site was actually a working space, with a mission critical server in it, backed up only by a USB external disk. So we changed the plan: instead of a production server and an offsite DR server, we now had two production servers, each of which replicated to the other for its offsite DR. This was a big perk for the customer, because the lower-specced “DR” appliance still handily outperformed their original server, as well as providing ZFS and Sanoid’s benefits of rolling snapshots, offsite replication, high data integrity, and so forth.

But it still bothered me that we didn’t have solid state in the second suite.

The main suite had two pools – one solid state, for boot disks and database instances, and one rust, for bulk storage (now including backups of this suite). Yes, our second suite was performing better now than it had been on their original, non-Sanoid server… but they had a MySQL instance that tended to be noticeably slow on inserts, and the desire to put that MySQL instance on solid state was just making me itch. Problem is, the client was 250 miles away, and their Sanoid Standard appliance was full – eight hot-swap bays, each of which already had a disk in it. No more room at the inn!

We needed minimal downtime, and we also needed minimal on-site time for me.

You can’t remove a vdev from an existing pool, so we couldn’t just drop the existing four-mirror pool to a three-mirror pool. So what do you do? We could have stuffed the new pair of SSDs somewhere inside the case, but I really didn’t want to give up the convenience of externally accessible hot swap bays.

So what do you do?

In this case, what you do – after discussing all the pros and cons with the client decision makers, of course – is you break some vdevs. Our existing pool had four mirrors, like this:

	NAME                              STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	data                              ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0                        ONLINE       0     0     0
	    wwn-0x50014ee20b8b7ba0-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    wwn-0x50014ee20be7deb4-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-1                        ONLINE       0     0     0
	    wwn-0x50014ee261102579-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    wwn-0x50014ee2613cc470-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-2                        ONLINE       0     0     0
	    wwn-0x50014ee2613cfdf8-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    wwn-0x50014ee2b66693b9-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-3                        ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x50014ee20b9b4e0d-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x50014ee2610ffa17-part3  ONLINE       0     0     0

Each of those mirrors can be broken, freeing up one disk – at the expense of removing redundancy on that mirror, of course. At first, I thought I’d break all the mirrors, create a two-mirror pool, migrate the data, then destroy the old pool and add one more mirror to the new pool. And that would have worked – but it would have left the data unbalanced, so that the majority of reads would only hit two of my three mirrors. I decided to go for the cleanest result possible – a three mirror pool with all of its data distributed equally across all three mirrors – and that meant I’d need to do my migration in two stages, with two periods of user downtime.

First, I broke mirror-0 and mirror-1.

I detached a single disk from each of my first two mirrors, then cleared its ZFS label afterward.

    root@client-prod1:/# zpool detach wwn-0x50014ee20be7deb4-part3 ; zpool labelclear wwn-0x50014ee20be7deb4-part3
    root@client-prod1:/# zpool detach wwn-0x50014ee2613cc470-part3 ; zpool labelclear wwn-0x50014ee2613cc470-part3

Now mirror-0 and mirror-1 are in DEGRADED condition, as is the pool – but it’s still up and running, and the users (who are busily working on storage and MySQL virtual machines hosted on the Sanoid Standard appliance we’re shelled into) are none the wiser.

Now we can create a temporary pool with the two freed disks.

We’ll also be sure to set compression on by default for all datasets created on or replicated onto our new pool – something I truly wish was the default setting for OpenZFS, since for almost all possible cases, LZ4 compression is a big win.

    root@client-prod1:/# zpool create -o ashift=12 tmppool mirror wwn-0x50014ee20be7deb4-part3 wwn-0x50014ee2613cc470-part3
    root@client-prod1:/# zfs set compression=lz4 tmppool

We haven’t really done much yet, but it felt like a milestone – we can actually start moving data now!

Next, we use Syncoid to replicate our VMs onto the new pool.

At this point, these are still running VMs – so our users won’t see any downtime yet. After doing an initial replication with them up and running, we’ll shut them down and do a “touch-up” – but this way, we get the bulk of the work done with all systems up and running, keeping our users happy.

    root@client-prod1:/# syncoid -r data/images tmppool/images ; syncoid -r data/backup tmppool/backup

This took a while, but I was very happy with the performance – never dipped below 140MB/sec for the entire replication run. Which also strongly implies that my users weren’t seeing a noticeable amount of slowdown! This initial replication completed in a bit over an hour.

Now, I was ready for my first little “blip” of actual downtime.

First, I shut down all the VMs running on the machine:

    root@client-prod1:/# virsh shutdown suite100 ; virsh shutdown suite100-mysql ; virsh shutdown suite100-openvpn
    root@client-prod1:/# watch -n 1 virsh list

As soon as virsh list showed me that the last of my three VMs were down, I ctrl-C’ed out of my watch command and replicated again, to make absolutely certain that no user data would be lost.

    root@client-prod1:/# syncoid -r data/images tmppool/images ; syncoid -r data/backup tmppool/backup

This time, my replication was done in less than ten seconds.

Doing replication in two steps like this is a huge win for uptime, and a huge win for the users – while our initial replication needed a little more than an hour, the “touch-up” only had to copy as much data as the users could store in a few moments, so it was done in a flash.

Next, it’s time to rename the pools.

Our system expects to find the storage for its VMs in /data/images/VMname, so for minimum downtime and reconfiguration, we’ll just export and re-import our pools so that it finds what it’s looking for.

    root@client-prod1:/# zpool export data ; zpool import data olddata 
    root@client-prod1:/# zfs set mountpoint=/olddata/images/qemu olddata/images/qemu ; zpool export olddata

Wait, what was that extra step with the mountpoint?

Sanoid keeps the virtual machines’ hardware definitions on the zpool rather than on the root filesystem – so we want to make sure our old pool’s ‘qemu’ dataset doesn’t try to automount itself back to its original mountpoint, /etc/libvirt/qemu.

    root@client-prod1:/# zpool export tmppool ; zpool import tmppool data
    root@client-prod1:/# zfs set mountpoint=/etc/libvirt/qemu data/images/qemu

OK, at this point our original, degraded zpool still exists, intact, as an exported pool named olddata; and our temporary two disk pool exists as an active pool named data, ready to go.

After less than one minute of downtime, it’s time to fire up the VMs again.

    root@client-prod1:/# virsh start suite100 ; virsh start suite100-mysql ; virsh start suite100-openvpn

If anybody took a potty break or got up for a fresh cup of coffee, they probably missed our first downtime window entirely. Not bad!

Time to destroy the old pool, and re-use its remaining disks.

After a couple of checks to make absolutely sure everything was working – not that it shouldn’t have been, but I’m definitely of the “measure twice, cut once” school, especially when the equipment is a few hundred miles away – we’re ready for the first completely irreversible step in our eight-disk fandango: destroying our original pool, so that we can create our final one.

    root@client-prod1:/# zpool destroy olddata
    root@client-prod1:/# zpool create -o ashift=12 newdata mirror wwn-0x50014ee20b8b7ba0-part3 wwn-0x50014ee261102579-part3
    root@client-prod1:/# zpool add -o ashift=12 newdata mirror wwn-0x50014ee2613cfdf8-part3 wwn-0x50014ee2b66693b9-part3
    root@client-prod1:/# zpool add -o ashift=12 newdata mirror wwn-0x50014ee20b9b4e0d-part3 wwn-0x50014ee2610ffa17-part3
    root@client-prod1:/# zfs set compression=lz4 newdata

Perfect! Our new, final pool with three mirrors is up, LZ4 compression is enabled, and it’s ready to go.

Now we do an initial Syncoid replication to the final, six-disk pool:

    root@client-prod1:/# syncoid -r data/images newdata/images ; syncoid -r data/backup newdata/backup

About an hour later, it’s time to shut the VMs down for Brief Downtime Window #2.

    root@client-prod1:/# virsh shutdown suite100 ; virsh shutdown suite100-mysql ; virsh shutdown suite100-openvpn
    root@client-prod1:/# watch -n 1 virsh list

Once our three VMs are down, we ctrl-C out of ‘watch’ again, and…

Time for our final “touch-up” re-replication:

    root@client-prod1:/# syncoid -r data/images newdata/images ; syncoid -r data/backup newdata/backup

At this point, all the actual data is where it should be, in the right datasets, on the right pool.

We fix our mountpoints, shuffle the pool names, and fire up our VMs again:

    root@client-prod1:/# zpool export data ; zpool import data tmppool 
    root@client-prod1:/# zfs set mountpoint=/tmppool/images/qemu olddata/images/qemu ; zpool export tmppool
    root@client-prod1:/# zpool export newdata ; zpool import newdata data
    root@client-prod1:/# zfs set mountpoint=/etc/libvirt/qemu data/images/qemu
    root@client-prod1:/# virsh start suite100 ; virsh start suite100-mysql ; virsh start suite100-openvpn

Boom! Another downtime window over with in less than a minute.

Our TOTAL elapsed downtime was less than two minutes.

At this point, our users are up and running on the final three-mirror pool, and we won’t be inconveniencing them again today. Again we do some testing to make absolutely certain everything’s fine, and of course it is.

The very last step: destroying tmppool.

    root@client-prod1:/# zpool destroy tmppool

That’s it; we’re done for the day.

We’re now up and running on only six total disks, not eight, which gives us the room we need to physically remove two disks. With those two disks gone, we’ve got room to slap in a pair of SSDs for a second pool with a solid-state mirror vdev when we’re (well, I’m) there in person, in a week or so. That will also take a minute or less of actual downtime – and in that case, the preliminary replication will go ridiculously fast too, since we’ll only be moving the MySQL VM (less than 20G of data), and we’ll be writing at solid state device speeds (upwards of 400MB/sec, for the Samsung Pro 850 series I’ll be using).

None of this was exactly rocket science. So why am I sharing it?

Well, it’s pretty scary going in to deliberately degrade a production system, so I wanted to lay out a roadmap for anybody else considering it. And I definitely wanted to share the actual time taken for the various steps – I knew my downtime windows would be very short, but honestly I’d been a little unsure how the initial replication would go, given that I was deliberately breaking mirrors and degrading arrays. But it went great! 140MB/sec sustained throughput makes even pretty substantial tasks go by pretty quickly – and aside from the two intervals with a combined downtime of less than two minutes, my users never even noticed anything happening.

Closing with a plug: yes, you can afford it.

If this kind of converged infrastructure (storage and virtualization) management sounds great to you – high performance, rapid onsite and offsite replication, nearly zero user downtime, and a whole lot more – let me add another bullet point: low cost. Getting started isn’t prohibitively expensive.

Sanoid appliances like the ones we’re describing here – including all the operating systems, hardware, and software needed to run your VMs and manage their storage and automatically replicate them both on and offsite – start at less than $5,000. For more information, send us an email, or call us at (803) 250-1577.

libguestfs0 and ZFS on Linux in Ubuntu

Trying to get Kimchi installed this morning, I ran into a roadblock almost immediately: libguestfs-tools depends on libguestfs0, which, on Ubuntu at least, stupidly has a hard dependency on zfs-fuse. Which is a dead project, and which conflicts with zfsutils.

In the real world, you might want libguestfs-tools without ever wanting the first thing to do with ANY form of zfs, so this dependency is a really bad idea. Even if you DO want to use libguestfs-tools WITH zfs, it’s an incredibly bad idea because zfsutils – part of ZFS on Linux – provides all the functionality needed already. Unfortunately, the package maintainers don’t seem to quite understand the issues here – I’m guessing none of them are ZFS people – so that leaves you with the need to edit the dependencies yourself.

Luckily, that’s not too hard. First, you’ll need a script, which we’ll call debedit:

#!/bin/bash

EDITOR=nano

if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
  echo "Syntax: $0 debfile"
  exit 1
fi

DEBFILE="$1"
TMPDIR=`mktemp -d /tmp/deb.XXXXXXXXXX` || exit 1
OUTPUT=`basename "$DEBFILE" .deb`.modified.deb

if [[ -e "$OUTPUT" ]]; then
  echo "$OUTPUT exists."
  rm -r "$TMPDIR"
  exit 1
fi

dpkg-deb -x "$DEBFILE" "$TMPDIR"
dpkg-deb --control "$DEBFILE" "$TMPDIR"/DEBIAN

if [[ ! -e "$TMPDIR"/DEBIAN/control ]]; then
  echo DEBIAN/control not found.

  rm -r "$TMPDIR"
  exit 1
fi

CONTROL="$TMPDIR"/DEBIAN/control

MOD=`stat -c "%y" "$CONTROL"`
$EDITOR "$CONTROL"

if [[ "$MOD" == `stat -c "%y" "$CONTROL"` ]]; then
  echo Not modfied.
else
  echo Building new deb...
  dpkg -b "$TMPDIR" "$OUTPUT"
fi

rm -r "$TMPDIR"

Save that, name it debedit, and chmod 755 it.

Now, you’ll need to download libguestfs0, which is the package that has the bad dependencies, which you’ll edit:

you@box:~$ apt-get download libguestfs0
you@box:~$ ./debedit libguest*deb

Remove the zfs-fuse dependency from the Depends: line in the deb file, and exit nano. Finally, install your modified libguestfs0 package:

you@box:~$ sudo dpkg -i *modified.deb ; sudo apt-get -f install

All done! At least, until and unless the next update to libguestfs0 downloads and attempts to install a new .deb that wants to put that dependency right back again, in which case you’ll need to lather-rinse-repeat.

I me-too’ed an existing bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libguestfs/+bug/1053911 ; if you’re affected, you probably should too.

ZFS compression: yes, you want this

So ZFS dedup is a complete lose. What about compression?

Compression is a hands-down win. LZ4 compression should be on by default for nearly anything you ever set up under ZFS. I typically have LZ4 on even for datasets that will house database binaries… yes, really. Let’s look at two quick test runs, on a Xeon E3 server with 32GB ECC RAM and a pair of Samsung 850 EVO 1TB disks set up as a mirror vdev.

This is an inline compression torture test: we’re reading pseudorandom data (completely incompressible) and writing it to an LZ4 compressed dataset.

root@lab:/data# pv < in.rnd > incompressible/out.rnd
7.81GB 0:00:22 [ 359MB/s] [==================================>] 100%

root@lab:/data# zfs get compressratio data/incompressible
NAME                 PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
data/incompressible  compressratio  1.00x  -

359MB/sec write… yyyyyeah, I’d say LZ4 isn’t hurting us too terribly here – and this is a worst case scenario. What about something a little more realistic? Let’s try again, this time with a raw binary of my Windows Server 2012 R2 “gold” image (the OS is installed and Windows Updates are applied, but nothing else is done to it):

root@lab:/data/test# pv < win2012r2-gold.raw > realworld/win2012r2-gold.out
8.87GB 0:00:17 [ 515MB/s] [==================================>] 100%

Oh yeah – 515MB/sec this time. Definitely not hurting from using our LZ4 compression. What’d we score for a compression ratio?

root@lab:/data# zfs get compressratio data/realworld
NAME            PROPERTY       VALUE  SOURCE
data/realworld  compressratio  1.48x  -

1.48x sounds pretty good! Can we see some real numbers on that?

root@lab:/data# ls -lh /data/realworld/win2012r2-gold.raw
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 8.9G Feb 24 18:01 win2012r2-gold.raw
root@lab:/data# du -hs /data/realworld
6.2G	/data/realworld

8.9G of data in 6.2G of space… with sustained writes of 515MB/sec.

What if we took our original 8G of incompressible data, and wrote it to an uncompressed dataset?

root@lab:/data#  zfs create data/uncompressed
root@lab:/data# zfs set compression=off data/uncompressed
root@lab:/data# cat 8G.in > /dev/null ; # this is to make sure our source data is preloaded in the ARC
root@lab:/data# pv < 8G.in > uncompressed/8G.out
7.81GB 0:00:21 [ 378MB/s] [==================================>] 100%

So, our worst case scenario – completely incompressible data – means a 5% performance hit, and a more real-world-ish scenario – copying a Windows Server installation – means a 27% performance increase. That’s on fast solid state, of course; the performance numbers will look even better on slower storage (read: spinning rust), where even worst-case writes are unlikely to slow down at all.

Yep, that’s a win.

ZFS dedup: tested, found wanting

Even if you have the RAM for it (and we’re talking a good 6GB or so per TB of storage), ZFS deduplication is, unfortunately, almost certainly a lose.

I don’t usually have that much RAM to spare, but one server has 192GB of RAM and only a few terabytes of storage – and it stores a lot of VM images, with obvious serious block-level duplication between images. Dedup shows at 1.35+ on all the datasets, and would be higher if one VM didn’t have a couple of terabytes of almost dup-free data on it.

That server’s been running for a few years now, and nobody using it has complained. But I was doing some maintenance on it today, splitting up VMs into their own datasets, and saw some truly abysmal performance.

root@virt0:/data/images# pv < jabberserver.qcow2 > jabber/jabberserver.qcow2 206MB 0:00:31 [7.14MB/s] [>                  ]  1% ETA 0:48:41

7MB/sec? UGH! And that’s not even a sustained average; that’s just where it happened to be when I killed the process. This server should be able to sustain MUCH better performance than that, even though it’s reading and writing from the same pool. So I checked, and saw that dedup was on:

root@virt0:~# zpool list
NAME   SIZE  ALLOC   FREE    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
data  7.06T  2.52T  4.55T    35%  1.35x  ONLINE  -

In theory, you’d think that dedup would help tremendously with exactly this operation: copying a quiesced VM from one dataset to another on the same pool. There’s no need for a single block of data to be rewritten, just more pointers added to the metadata for the existing blocks. However, dedup looked like the obvious culprit for my performance woes here, so I disabled it and tried again:

root@virt0:/data/images# pv < jabberserver.qcow2 > jabber/jabberserver.qcow219.2GB 0:04:58 [65.7MB/s] [============>] 100%

Yep, that’s more like it.

TL;DR: ZFS dedup sounds like a great idea, but in the real world, it sucks. Even on a machine built to handle it. Even on exactly the kind of storage (a bunch of VMs with similar or identical operating systems) that seems tailor-made for it. I do not recommend its use for pretty much any conceivable workload.

(On the other hand, LZ4 compression is an unqualified win.)