With apologies for clogging up the forum with beginner questions - I'm trying to figure out how to build a home zfs server. Common question. In the last two months of reading the net and here, I've found many answers, none of which would convince me to part with the $800-$1K to do it.
So can someone take pity on a beginner and tell me - will this work? It's about my seventeenth paper design for the server. Objectives are 1 - zfs and other considerations for data preservation 2 - file server operation 3 - units of terabytes, consistent with a few (less than a dozen) disks 4 - as low an electrical power use as practical, given the above I've thrashed through Intel vs AMD, ECC, chipset support, number of ports, adapters, and so on ad nauseum. Here's what I think will work: Supermicro MBD-X7SBL-LN1-O intel Xeon E3110 unregistered ECC, 4GB - 8GB What I can't pick out of the overwhelming flood of raw data I've read is: 1 - does opensolaris offer driver support for the SATA ports resident on the motherboard (Intel® 3200 + ICH9R), or must I get another board to run them? I'm happy with the six SATA ports on the MB to start with 2 - does opensolaris directly support the LAN chips ( Intel 82573V) on that MB, or must I grab a NIC to stick in a slot? 3 - does opensolaris support that graphics chipset (XGI Volari Z9S) well enough to let me install and get it bootstrapped into operation, after which I'll make it headless. 4 - Are there any gotchas which would keep me from enabling and running the ECC memory functions productively; I think this is a "no", but as long as I'm asking questions... Things of some considerations but lesser importance: 5. Electrical power; the E3110 is a low-ish power chip (nominally 65W) Low power is nice, but not a killer. I'd prefer it to be low, and am willing to take slow to get more of that, because my file server needs are not in any way real time. I just need a large, but reliable, bit bucket. 6. Cost; I've been through several iterations of something with an AMD Athlon 11 X2 240e with an Asus motherboard to get lower power and cost for the same objectives. I can't tell that the silly thing would or would not be something I could make run. And frankly, the data is worth more than the extra $200 or so for the intel solution - iff the intel solution works. But I really am not interested in buying a canned commercial solution for a couple of $K. I'm willing to put in the work setting up and managing the system in lieu of that, so there is a dollar threshold, I guess. And the last silly question. It seems to me that you'd have many, many adopters if there was a real answer to what the HCL tries to be and isn't - an answer to "if I buy this stuff, do I have a prayer of making it work, or is there a subtle gotcha that's going to waste my time and money?" We used to solve that with reference designs. They don't have to be perfect, they don't have to be optimal, but they should be practical and they should be modestly predictable given moderate skill in the art. I think that an intel and an AMD reference design would be a screaming good idea for improving the acceptance and population of opensolaris. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
