Over the past few months I have seen mention of FreeBSD a couple
time in regards to ZFS. My question is how stable (reliable) is ZFS on
this platform ?
This is for a home server and the reason I am asking is that about
a year ago I bought some hardware based on it's inclusion on the
Solaris 10 HCL, as follows:
SuperMicro 7045A-WTB (although I would have preferred the server
version, but it wasn't on the HCL)
Two quad core 2.0 GHz Xeon CPUs
8 GB RAM (I am NOT planning on using DeDupe)
2 x Seagate ES-2 250 GB SATA drives for the OS
4 x Seagate ES-2 1 TB SATA drives for data
Nvidia Geforce 8400 (cheapest video card I could get locally)
I could not get the current production Solaris or OpenSolaris to
load. The miniroot would GPF while loading the kernel. I could not get
the problem resolved and needed to get the server up and running as my
old server was dying (dual 550 MHz P3 with 1 GB RAM) and I needed to
get my data (about 600 GB) off of it before I lost anything. That old
server was running Solaris 10 and the data was in a zpool with
mirrored vdevs of different sized drives. I had lost one drive in each
vdev and zfs saved my data. So I loaded OpenSuSE and moved the data to
a mirrored pair of 1 TB drives.
I still want to move my data to ZFS, and push has come to shove,
as I am about to overflow the 1 TB mirror and I really, really hate
the Linux options for multiple disk device management (I'm spoiled by
SVM and ZFS). So now I really need to get that hardware loaded with an
OS that supports ZFS. I have tried every variation of Solaris that I
can get my hands on including Solaris 11 Express and Nexenta 3 and
they all GPF loading the kernel to run the installer. My last hope is
that I have a very plain vanilla (ancient S540) video card to swap in
for the Nvidia on the very long shot chance that is the problem. But I
need a backup plan if that does not work.
I have tested the hardware with FreeBSD 8 and it boots to the
installer. So my question is whether the FreeBSD ZFS port is up to
production use ? Is there anyone here using FreeBSD in production with
good results (this list tends to only hear about serious problems and
not success stories) ?
P.S. If anyone here has a suggestion as to how to get Solaris to load
I would love to hear it. I even tried disabling multi-cores (which
makes the CPUs look like dual core instead of quad) with no change. I
have not been able to get serial console redirect to work so I do not
have a good log of the failures.
--
{--------1---------2---------3---------4---------5---------6---------7---------}
Paul Kraus
-> Senior Systems Architect, Garnet River ( http://www.garnetriver.com/ )
-> Sound Coordinator, Schenectady Light Opera Company (
http://www.sloctheater.org/ )
-> Technical Advisor, RPI Players
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