A little while ago we purchased an additional SAS storage enclosure for our existing Linux Hardened Repository server. Due to the number of disks, and also because we only have a Host Bus Adaptor rather than a hardware RAID card, we attempted to set this up as 5 md-raid6 arrays of 12 drives each, combined into a single volume using LVM.

While initially this seemed to be working, after a little bit we have been getting tons of I/O errors. We exhausted all possible troubleshooting steps in collaboration with Veeam support, but it just seems like this is a wrong setup for a Veeam repository.

I recently discovered the concept of “XFS on ZFS”, i.e. the idea of being able to set up a ZFS ZPOOL - which would replace the md-raid and LVM parts mentioned above - and then format this with the XFS filesystem. Apparently this is not a new idea either, as I found it was mentioned briefly in a Veeam webinar at https://www.veeam.com/resources/videos/build-secure-repositories-17144.html?rwty.

Does anyone know if there’s a detailed guide on how to set this up? As I could not find any instructions in the Veeam Knowledge Base or User Guide on how to do it?