On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 7:47 AM, Paul Kraus <p...@kraus-haus.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
I've heard nothing but good things about it. FreeNAS uses it:
http://freenas.org/ and IXSystems sells a commercial product based on the
FreeNAS/FreeBSD code. I don't think they have a full-blown implementation
of CIFS (just Samba), but other than that, I don't think you'll have too
many issues. I actually considered moving over to it, but I made the
unfortunate mistake of upgrading to Solaris 11 Express, which means my zpool
version is now too new to run anything else (AFAIK).
--Tim
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