We might have a better change of diagnosing your problem if we had a copy of your panic message buffer. Have you considered OpenIndiana and illumos as an option, or even NexentaStor if you are just looking for a storage appliance (though my guess is that you need more general purpose compute capabilities)?
-- Garrett D'Amore On May 18, 2011, at 2:48 PM, "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 > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss