The most important thing storage does is survive failure. OviOS ships with two built-in tools for that: ovios-cluster mirrors your primary to a secondary, which can sit at your DR site, and retadm replicates your data for backup and recovery.
An ovios-cluster secondary is a live mirror of the primary, so you can place it at your
DR site. If the primary or the whole site is lost, a failover, automatic or manual, gives you access to your
data on the secondary. Create the cluster with ovios-cluster init on the primary and add nodes
with ovios-cluster add.
ovios-cluster statussync, push-archive and
resyncovios-cluster promote. You stay in control, no
license needed.With a license, the cluster fails over on its own when the primary goes down, with no manual step.
ovios-cluster licenseretadm replicates volumes and LUNs to one or several remote nodes. It works as a backup, and with manual intervention the replicated data can be used for disaster recovery too. It is included with every OviOS.
The first run copies everything. After that only changes travel, so updates are fast and light on the network.
Replication keeps going even if you close the terminal, and can be scheduled with cron.
retadm doctor diagnoses a broken replication and
retadm repair fixes it.
Every scenario below can be combined with retadm replication and an HA cluster.
Serve datastores over iSCSI or NVMe-oF. Thin LUNs with discard/UNMAP return space freed by Linux, Windows and VMware VMFS6 clients to the pool.
SMB shares with Active Directory join and Windows ACLs for office users, NFS for Linux and Unix servers.
ZFS snapshots, compression and end-to-end checksums make a trustworthy repository, and retadm can copy it offsite.
Expose ZFS datasets as S3 buckets with the built-in MinIO-compatible gateway.
Boot from USB or PXE, keep no system disk, and swap the boot medium without rebuilding. The configuration comes back from your pools.
Production-grade ZFS storage on spare hardware, set up in minutes and free to use. Try an HA cluster and failover on a few small machines.
OviOS offers different tiers to match your use case, from free community editions to enterprise-grade personalized builds.
OviOS is a software-defined appliance-like storage OS built on the Linux kernel. As such, hardware compatibility and requirements are not our direct responsibility. We recommend verifying hardware compatibility with the underlying Linux kernel and ZFS components. For optimal performance, ensure your hardware meets the minimum specifications outlined in our documentation.
While we provide guidance and support for software-related issues, hardware selection, configuration, and troubleshooting remain the user's domain.
Apart from the OviOS proprietary shell and additional features, OviOS is built upon a collection of open-source components — including but not limited to the Linux kernel, OpenZFS, Samba, the Linux NFS server, TGT (iSCSI), and other libraries and utilities. These components are maintained by their respective upstream projects and communities and are distributed under their own open-source licenses.
Bugs, vulnerabilities, behavioral issues, or incompatibilities arising from these third-party open-source components are outside the scope of OviOS's direct liability. We make reasonable efforts to track upstream releases and incorporate fixes where feasible, but we cannot guarantee the fitness, security, or correctness of any underlying open-source dependency for any specific purpose.
Users are encouraged to consult the upstream project documentation and issue trackers for known issues, and to apply updates through the OviOS update mechanism as they become available. Please refer to our documentation for information on supported component versions.