We have two aging Netapp filers and can't afford to buy new Netapp gear,
so we've been looking with a lot of interest at building NFS fileservers
running ZFS as a possible future approach. Two issues have come up in the
discussion
- Adding new disks to a RAID-Z pool (Netapps handle adding new disks very
nicely). Mirroring is an alternative, but when you're on a tight budget
losing N/2 disk capacity is painful.
- The default scheme of one filesystem per user runs into problems with
linux NFS clients; on one linux system, with 1300 logins, we already have
to do symlinks with amd because linux systems can't mount more than about
255 filesystems at once. We can of course just have one filesystem
exported, and make /home/student a subdirectory of that, but then we run
into problems with quotas -- and on an undergraduate fileserver, quotas
aren't optional!
Neither of these problems are necessarily showstoppers, but both make the
transition more difficult. Any progress that could be made with them
would help sites like us make the switch sooner.
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