Can I manage ZFS with Landscape and MAAS?

Question

I have 5 different servers. I am very interested in installing ZFS across all of them. I also am interested in using JuJu, MAAS, and Landscape to automate the installation of ZFS, and the management of each server. For instance I do not want to manually install ZFS on each machine.

I have 4 questions:

1. Can ZFS be used smoothly with Landscape, JuJu, and MAAS?

2. Is it possible to have Landscape manage the ZFS installation process?

3. Landscape supports two types of storage. One is iSCSI, and the other is Ceph storage. Can any of these be configured to install ZFS during the storage allocation phase?

4. How is raid/mirroring set up using JuJu, Landscape, and MAAS?

5. Can I setup ZFS mirroring from the Landscape console? .

Referenced Programs/Utilities: (ZFS (Z File System), JuJu (Ubuntu Cloud), MAAS (Metal as a Service), and Landscape (See Page)).

Answer 1

I'll do a first pass and the Community will improve this answer. Here we go:

1. It depends on the meaning of smoothly and what you are trying to do exactly. Once the systems using ZFS are installed, Landscape and/or JuJu can manage them like any other Ubuntu system.

2. Landscape does not do bare metal deployment, it relies on MAAS to accomplish this task. The answer will be yes once MAAS can drive the 16.04 install process to select a ZFS option. Xenial needs to ship first, you can try the 16.04 betas to check this.

3. Landscape's Autopilot can build an OpenStack cloud with iSCSI or Ceph storage, but the backend details are hidden to make things simpler for the end user. You cannot select what filesystem type underlies these network storage options.

4. In the Landscape case, RAID is either not relevant (Ceph) or not used in the supplied configuration (iSCSI). In the MAAS case, setting up RAID underneath iSCSI should be possible but it is highly dependent on the system hardware.

5. No, you cannot configure ZFS mirroring from Landscape at present. And you said you had 4 questions ;-)