Our ZFS implementation is on hold for 12 months while we wait for a few features to mature. We're still very interested in ZFS, and have even put off the purchase of a SAN since the technology looks so promising, I just hope it grows to live up to expectations. The main problems we hit were:
ZFS seems to be a huge step forward in emulating windows permissions, but unfortunately it's not quite there yet. Neither Samba nor the Solaris CIFS server worked for us. They're very nearly there though, so we're watching developments here closely. Also, ZFS's snapshots are great, but we don't consider them ready for production use when we have to stop snapshots in order for a resilver to finish. If we felt this would be fixed soon we might have lived with this. However as far as I can tell the bug report for this has been open for several years, so we're waiting for this to be fixed before we even consider the rollout. I'm also concerned about the way the admin and management tools hang if ZFS is waiting for a reply from a device. If I have a fully raided or mirrored zpool, a slow reply or failure of one device should not affect the performance of the volume, and should definately not affect the performance of the fault reporting tools. ZFS is a long way behind established raid controllers and NAS or SAN devices here. Some of the ZFS features could do with more documentation. I've seen several posts from people here struggling to work out how to use the ZFS tools in a data recovery situation. The manuals would benefits from a few disaster recovery examples in my opinion. In our case we generated a few disaster scenarios during testing, and documented recovery procedures ourselves, but it would have been a lot easier if this information had been provided. However one sucess story is that Solaris and ZFS are very easy to learn and use. I'm a windows admin with no experience of Unix prior to this. In the space of three months I've quite happily installed Solaris, OpenSolaris, ZFS, iSCSI, NFS, Samba, the Solaris CIFS server, and a three node OpenSolaris cluster running ZFS, NFS and Samba. None of it presented any major difficulty, and I was very impressed with how easy it was to set up a clustered NFS provider as storage for VMware ESX server. Remote admin of Solaris from a windows box via Cygwin & SSH or X-windows is superb, and an absolute joy to work with. We now have a small ZFS box I'm using at home for some off-site backups as a long term test, with Samba file sharing for my home network. Overall the experience has definately made me a fan of Solaris & ZFS, and I'm actively looking forward to the day we are able to roll it out on our network. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
