http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,2319.0.html
Been waiting for this and really interested in trying this one out and migrating my RAID-F FlexRAID arary to it in the future possibly.
Here is an older comparison about the differences between FlexRAID RAID-F which a lot of you are probably familar with (RAID over Filesystem) and the new tRAID (Transparent RAID)
http://openegg.org/2013/02/21/flexraids-raid-f-vs-nzfs/
Time to get to some VM testing for me.
From the thread:
Without further ado, presenting: Transparent RAID™ (tRAID™.
What is Transparent RAID™ (tRAID™?
Transparent RAID is a storage protection scheme in which drives behave as if not part of a RAID. Each drive can be partitioned, formatted, pooled into a larger volume, and whatnot as usual.
Nevertheless, parity is computed transparently to enable data recovery in the event a drive failure.
Additionally, new drives being protected can be added while preserving their existing data.
This makes it easy to add and remove a drive from the protective array.
So, you get all of the protection benefit of RAID without actually running in RAID mode and none of the restrictions!
How did we accomplish this?
Transparent RAID uses the same technology as VMware does to virtualize its storage devices.
The key aspect of this virtualization approach is support for passthrough devices.
Storage Pooling
By design, tRAID has no concept of storage pooling, and you can effectively use it without any storage pooling.
You can read/write from/to the individual transparent drives and parity is captured transparently.
Nonetheless, tRAID comes with a new Storage Pooling technology, which is enabled by default.
In all, you will have several options with tRAID:
Run without pooling:
In this mode, each drive is effectively standalone.
Run with native pooling for tRAID (default and recommended):
Unlike the storage pooling in RAID-F, the native pooling for TRAID does not use mounted drives.
Instead, it pools the drives by interacting with the file system (NTFS or other) driver directly and by accessing the raw volumes.
This makes for a much lighter-weight and robust solution. More on this later.
Run with RAID-F pooling:
You can use any storage pooling solution already on the market including RAID-F's storage pooling if those fit your needs more appropriately.
Installation
Transparent RAID is a feature borrowed from the NZFS RAID stack.
As such, you will be installing a very restricted version of NZFS.
The UI, Service Broker, and Kernel Engine have been crippled to only allow you to do tRAID related operations.
There are two packages to install:
The host deployment package:
The host package is just a zip file that you unzip to a directory where you want the service broker to run from.
Once unzipped, you simply right-click on the "install.bat" file and run it as administrator.
The following rules apply:
You must reboot your system after installing.
Moreover, you MUST reboot before uninstalling and after uninstalling. The uninstall script must also be run as administrator.
The Web Client administration application:
The client application installs the same way you install FlexRAID RAID-F (execute the EXE and follow the screens).
You only need one client application install to manage multiple hosts. In fact, you should never manage the same host from multiple clients.
Wiki
http://wiki.flexraid.com/category/traid/
RC1 Release
Completed UI features:
Creating RAID
Deploying RAID
Verifying RAID
Restoring RAID (including being able to restore to PPU)
RAID Expansion
RAID Contraction
Automatic RAID Restoration from Global Hot-Spare
RAID Import by Host Scanning
Native Storage Pooling for tRAID
Configuration Override (to easily simulate recovery scenarios and to execute advanced operations)
Scheduled Configuration DB Backup to Directory & to Email
Powerful Enterprise Level Scheduler
SMART Monitoring
Dashboard & Charts
Alerts (email, SMS, & Sound)
UI Themes: 9 to choose from
Download:
Host Package http://download.openegg.org/temp/traid/NZFS-TRAID-HOST-RC1.zip
Client Installer http://download.openegg.org/temp/traid/NZFS-TRAID-CLIENT-RC1.exe
Torrent http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2319.0;attach=1719 (thanks JuggalotusHeat)
Quick Notes
User/Password: admin/admin
After adding a host to manage onto the UI, activate by requesting a trial
Known Issues
- Trial licenses are invalidated when you uninstall the WebUI. Re-requesting the trial will work.
- If a host machine is restarted while the WebUI in active in your browser, you must refresh on the host's node in the WebUI to update of its status. That or refresh your browser to reload the WebUI.
- A few UI features still need to be completed (username/password change and the notification panel at the top still needs to be wired to the backend)
Important notes
Do use any RAID-F RAID (Snapshot RAID nor RT RAID) on tRAID as that would be redundant.
When initializing your tRAID array, your source drives will be placed in offline mode. Do not ever attempt to revive them from that state.
tRAID puts the source drives in offline mode and then presents itself to the OS as being the drives placed in offline mode.
Switching the source drives from offline mode will confuse the OS and might lead to data corruption as the OS will be seeing two drives pretending to be the same device.
Performance
The default configuration in RC1 represents the best case scenario for data integrity and the worst case scenario for performance.
What we mean by that is that we have crippled the performance of tRAID in favor of data integrity. In many cases, we have gone to the extreme.
Now, fear not! A few configuration changes in the UI will bring back some of that robbed performance once we all get comfortable with the new platform.
The reason behind all this is to create a safer introduction to Transparent RAID.
RAID, whether it be software RAID or hardware RAID has some inherent vulnerabilities when implemented without battery backup.
So, in accounting for power failures or system crashes, we have setup the default configuration to be as resilient as possible.
The performance tweaks should be enabled only after one's system has been tested stable under tRAID.
Been waiting for this and really interested in trying this one out and migrating my RAID-F FlexRAID arary to it in the future possibly.
Here is an older comparison about the differences between FlexRAID RAID-F which a lot of you are probably familar with (RAID over Filesystem) and the new tRAID (Transparent RAID)
http://openegg.org/2013/02/21/flexraids-raid-f-vs-nzfs/
Time to get to some VM testing for me.
From the thread:
Without further ado, presenting: Transparent RAID™ (tRAID™.
What is Transparent RAID™ (tRAID™?
Transparent RAID is a storage protection scheme in which drives behave as if not part of a RAID. Each drive can be partitioned, formatted, pooled into a larger volume, and whatnot as usual.
Nevertheless, parity is computed transparently to enable data recovery in the event a drive failure.
Additionally, new drives being protected can be added while preserving their existing data.
This makes it easy to add and remove a drive from the protective array.
So, you get all of the protection benefit of RAID without actually running in RAID mode and none of the restrictions!
How did we accomplish this?
Transparent RAID uses the same technology as VMware does to virtualize its storage devices.
The key aspect of this virtualization approach is support for passthrough devices.
Storage Pooling
By design, tRAID has no concept of storage pooling, and you can effectively use it without any storage pooling.
You can read/write from/to the individual transparent drives and parity is captured transparently.
Nonetheless, tRAID comes with a new Storage Pooling technology, which is enabled by default.
In all, you will have several options with tRAID:
Run without pooling:
In this mode, each drive is effectively standalone.
Run with native pooling for tRAID (default and recommended):
Unlike the storage pooling in RAID-F, the native pooling for TRAID does not use mounted drives.
Instead, it pools the drives by interacting with the file system (NTFS or other) driver directly and by accessing the raw volumes.
This makes for a much lighter-weight and robust solution. More on this later.
Run with RAID-F pooling:
You can use any storage pooling solution already on the market including RAID-F's storage pooling if those fit your needs more appropriately.
Installation
Transparent RAID is a feature borrowed from the NZFS RAID stack.
As such, you will be installing a very restricted version of NZFS.
The UI, Service Broker, and Kernel Engine have been crippled to only allow you to do tRAID related operations.
There are two packages to install:
The host deployment package:
The host package is just a zip file that you unzip to a directory where you want the service broker to run from.
Once unzipped, you simply right-click on the "install.bat" file and run it as administrator.
The following rules apply:
You must reboot your system after installing.
Moreover, you MUST reboot before uninstalling and after uninstalling. The uninstall script must also be run as administrator.
The Web Client administration application:
The client application installs the same way you install FlexRAID RAID-F (execute the EXE and follow the screens).
You only need one client application install to manage multiple hosts. In fact, you should never manage the same host from multiple clients.
Wiki
http://wiki.flexraid.com/category/traid/
RC1 Release
Completed UI features:
Creating RAID
Deploying RAID
Verifying RAID
Restoring RAID (including being able to restore to PPU)
RAID Expansion
RAID Contraction
Automatic RAID Restoration from Global Hot-Spare
RAID Import by Host Scanning
Native Storage Pooling for tRAID
Configuration Override (to easily simulate recovery scenarios and to execute advanced operations)
Scheduled Configuration DB Backup to Directory & to Email
Powerful Enterprise Level Scheduler
SMART Monitoring
Dashboard & Charts
Alerts (email, SMS, & Sound)
UI Themes: 9 to choose from
Download:
Host Package http://download.openegg.org/temp/traid/NZFS-TRAID-HOST-RC1.zip
Client Installer http://download.openegg.org/temp/traid/NZFS-TRAID-CLIENT-RC1.exe
Torrent http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2319.0;attach=1719 (thanks JuggalotusHeat)
Quick Notes
User/Password: admin/admin
After adding a host to manage onto the UI, activate by requesting a trial
Known Issues
- Trial licenses are invalidated when you uninstall the WebUI. Re-requesting the trial will work.
- If a host machine is restarted while the WebUI in active in your browser, you must refresh on the host's node in the WebUI to update of its status. That or refresh your browser to reload the WebUI.
- A few UI features still need to be completed (username/password change and the notification panel at the top still needs to be wired to the backend)
Important notes
Do use any RAID-F RAID (Snapshot RAID nor RT RAID) on tRAID as that would be redundant.
When initializing your tRAID array, your source drives will be placed in offline mode. Do not ever attempt to revive them from that state.
tRAID puts the source drives in offline mode and then presents itself to the OS as being the drives placed in offline mode.
Switching the source drives from offline mode will confuse the OS and might lead to data corruption as the OS will be seeing two drives pretending to be the same device.
Performance
The default configuration in RC1 represents the best case scenario for data integrity and the worst case scenario for performance.
What we mean by that is that we have crippled the performance of tRAID in favor of data integrity. In many cases, we have gone to the extreme.
Now, fear not! A few configuration changes in the UI will bring back some of that robbed performance once we all get comfortable with the new platform.
The reason behind all this is to create a safer introduction to Transparent RAID.
RAID, whether it be software RAID or hardware RAID has some inherent vulnerabilities when implemented without battery backup.
So, in accounting for power failures or system crashes, we have setup the default configuration to be as resilient as possible.
The performance tweaks should be enabled only after one's system has been tested stable under tRAID.
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