Hi, I'm still debating wether I should use ZFS or not and how. Here is my scenario.
I want to run a server with a lot of storage, that gets disks added/upgraded from time to time to expand space. I'd want to store large files on it, 15mb - 5gb per file, and they'd only need to be accessible via NFS/FTP and maybe CIFS. The machine I have dedicated for this job would be a slow (2800+ S754) AMD64 with about 1.5G of slow ram (166Mhz (DDR333), though I could put in 200Mhz ram if it makes a BIG difference). The storage pool would look as follows, 2x 160GB, preferably as mirror or similar for OS +initial storage, IDE. 4x 500GB on a sil2124 Sata2 PCI/PCI-X controller, and later 4x300GB IDE via HPT374 PCI controller. Now I've been reading a lot about ZFS and it seems like it's the 'one FS to rule them all'. So here comes, should I use it? Traditionally I would run a software raid1/5 on each of the collection of disks, and LVM2 them together with reiserfs/jfs/xfs or even ext on top of it. This has worked reasonably well in the past but expanding/replacing/redistributing storage etc has been tricky. Ideally I'd like to use ZFS on Gentoo, but since my only option there is using the slow fuse, I'm also worried about stability. Is it 'ready' for reliable usage so to speak. I know ZFS cant' be used as a boot partition (yet) so i'd be ok with using 10 - 25gb from the 2 160's in mirror for the OS/Swap and all of the rest with ZFS. Also the support for 64bit in linux/gentoo is readily available, which I heard is 'best' for ZFS? My second idea then was to use FreeBSD, not cause I know it all that well, but there is a Gentoo/BSD which would make things easier for me. Unfortunately Gentoo/freeBSD64 doesn't exist yet :/ and if I have to learn 'regular' freeBSD I might as well take the extra step and learn opensolaris, not something i'd want to do learning new stuff isn't something i'm getting excited about at the moment :p However, I found on the liveDVD/CD that nexentia and beleniX both don't come in x86_64 flavors? Or does solaris autodetect and auto run in 64bit mode at boottime? Finally, I hope it's safe to assume that once I have one of these 2/3 options up and running, I can always change right? Say I set up an opensolaris server, but decide 2 years down the line I'd want to switch to a linux (which would then hopefully support native ZFS) it would be just a matter of exporting/importing the pool? Or is ZFS not right for me and I should choose one of the traditional methods, and why? Thanks for your time, Oliver _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
