Hi and thank you for your work!
I’ve just learned about Rockstor two week ago and decided to try it out. Did sound promising with btrfs and an easy way of sharing files to different platforms.
I downloaded Rockstor 3.8-12 and installed it on an Supermicro 6018U-TR4T+ with two SSD in a Raid-1 (Intel motherboard controller sSata) for the OS installtion. The installation did see the Raid disk and I used standard installation. Both SSD blinked and did install the OS, so the motherboard raid seemd to work. Then when the installation was finished and I rebooted into Rockstor, it bypassed the motherboard (fake raid) and booted on only one of the drives. Changes isn’t synced between the disks. After a few reboots the motherboard decides that the other disk is in lead and become primary. Rockstor starts but then all the changes is lost. So clearly the motherboard raid isn’t working when running Rockstor. Also in the OS the disks is presented sda, sda1, sda2, sda3 and sdb when the first disk is the active, and after reboot and if the second is active, then sda, sdb, sdb1, sdb2, sdb3. No md device present.
Next I installed a Qlogic QLE2672 dual FC 16GB/s card to the server and hooked it up to a Infortrend DS4024RUCB unit. This hardware raid unit has 24pcs 1,2Tb disks and I created two 12 disk raid-6 volumes and mapped the partitions to separate lun and fc channels. Nicely the disks present themselves as sdc and sdd via FC as transport. I create a single (hardware raid) pool with these two disks. My question is: how is the system distributing the filesystem between the disks when writing files, randomly or some loadbalance algorithm or should I do a btrfs raid-0?
After that I tried to modify network settings (command line) to create a bonding interface. It worked until I touched the network settings in the gui, then all was overwritten. So I reinstalled trying to create the interfaces with Network Manager during installation. Network Manager has great support for different types of interfaces. But it’s a bit touchy when using the GUI from within Rockstor. Configuration changes…
Next step is to buy the license, but then I noticed that it created a unique identifier everytime I reinstall the product. So I guess I have to wait until the “last” installation? Or can you generate a license the mapps to the host nic mac address or something so it is more easy to recover/reinstall?
Thinking about using it for production, but there are a few very small nice to have features that might stop me and make me install a full Centos 7. As described above motherboard raid for the operating system, lacp link aggregation for the network, and also quick access for usb disks connected to the server in case of temporary backup. Do you have any timeframe/roadmap for this?
Thank you! Looking forward to see this product evolve and also buy it to support you!