I thought you'd get 1001 opinions on this by now, but I'll give it a shot based on my end-user HW experience with OpenSolaris.
OS: It doesn't take much space, so you could certainly use the same set of drives & any mirrors for safety's sake. I'd even consider the same ZFS pool, sharing to clients only your "/data" directory structure or whatever you call it. i7 and new Xeon CPUs have some pretty slick performance and power saving features, and OpenSolaris has quite a few optimizations for these Nehalem class CPUs. My office i7 system cooks (i.e. is fast), but my Q6600 quad core at home performs exceedingly well, too. Motherboards are a religious thing with most people. Personally, I suggest sticking with Intel chipsets, preferably X38, X48, or X58. With that, you would get ICHxx SATA controllers (do these two always go hand in hand?). Pick a MB with a BIOS that lets you choose AHCI mode and not just RAID/ATA modes. You might have to download the manual to check this out. I've never used their boards, but I researched the MSI X58 Pro MB this year, and everything from the ethernet, to audio, to SATA controllers are supported by OpenSolaris. Also, it has an AHCI setting for the SATA controller, with 7 internal SATA ports AND 3 x16 PCIe gen2.0 slots! You don't have to use them for video, so a 4+ port PCIe x4 card would fit nicely into one of those. With that, do you need PCI-x? Those are my opinions. Melding the OS with the rest is a thinker, but I think I'd take advantage of the pool and set some reasonable space limits for the data & OS. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
