Warren Young wrote: > On 1/6/2010 2:35 PM, Boris Epstein wrote: >> we are trying to set >> up some storage servers to run under Linux > > You should also consider FreeBSD 8.0, which has the newest version of > ZFS up and running stably on it. I use Linux for most server tasks, but > for big storage, Linux just doesn't have anything like this yet. http://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-10:03.zfs.asc Nothing really big but it does kinda leave doubts...interesting that FreeBSD has absorbed pf and zfs and now claims to be twice as fast as Linux for mysql/postgresql workloads. Certainly sounds very different from the FreeBSD 4.4 that I knew. FreeBSD may now have ZFS support but it does not look quite the same as it does on Solaris/OpenSolaris. > > I'm not recommending OpenSolaris on purpose. For the last few years, it > was the only stable production-quality implementation of ZFS, but with > FreeBSD 8.0, it just lost that advantage. I think, as a Linux fan, you > will be happier with FreeBSD than OpenSolaris. Serious system administrators are not Linux fans I don't think. I tend to want to use the right tool for the job like OpenBSD for firewalling for example. I don't know about you but I find pkg on OpenSolaris to be more akin to yum or apt than ports and then there is always nexenta if I really want a complete GNU userland and apt/dpkg. I could not find out much are ZFS on FreeBSD. Its man page is just a copy of the Solaris one. Does it support direct sharing/exporting as nfs/cifs/iscsi like it does on Solaris/OpenSolaris? Does it support using ZFS for booting and boot environments and a related upgrade system? Nice that FreeBSD has improved its zfs support, I remember one person dissing zfs and pointing to vinum as an alternative but then maybe he did not know what he was talking about. However, there certainly is a lot more on vinum than there is on zfs in the FreeBSD manual. > >> storage volume would be in the range specified: 8-15 TB. > > That puts you right on the edge of workability with 32-bit hardware. > ext3's limit on 32-bit is 8 TB, and you can push it to 16 TB by > switching to XFS or JFS. Best to use 64-bit hardware if you can. Probably XFS if you want data guarantees on anything that is not a hardware raid card with bbu cache since JFS does not support barriers yet.