ZFS: Read Me 1st. Yes, it's back. You may also notice it is now hosted on my Blogger page - just don't have time to deal with self-hosting at the moment, but I've made sure the old URL redirects here. So, without further adieu.. Foreword I will be updating this article over time, so check back now and then. Latest update 9/12/2013 - Hot Spare, 4K Sector and ARC/L2ARC sections edited, note on ZFS Destroy section, minor edit to Compression section. There are a couple of things about ZFS itself that are often skipped over or missed by users/administrators. Many deploy home or business production systems without even being aware of these gotchya's and architectural issues. I do not want you to read this and think "ugh, forget ZFS". ZFS is one of the most powerful, flexible, and robust filesystems (and I use that word loosely, as ZFS is much more than just a filesystem, incorporating many elements of what is traditionally called a volume manager as well) available today. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 11. 12. 13.
Any reasons to abandon the free VMware Server? Quote: I will, since you asked so nicely IIRC I tried Xenserver but experienced some incompatibilities. The kernel was spewing some nasty errors about not being able to allocate memory and didn't elevate to GUI. No PCI passthrough or nothing like that, just a beefier desktop computer promoted to being a VM host for a bunch (2-3) lightly loaded (10 users?) LAMP/ Firebird/ postfix servers. Hell, I considered the older Vmware Server because that way I could get away with simply using a Linux install with mdadm raid - yes, we're that poor Virtualization would simply let me do 3 things I need: - separate my LAMP server from my Firebird server and from a mailserver running Groupoffice (total of 3 VMs) - test updates before rolling them into production - easily backup whole VMs for deployment in case of trouble - I'll be probably able to talk my boss into one serious HW upgrade for this, so would like to share those parts among virtual servers.
Check! Exactly my fears. Questions to ESXi all-in-one. Just my 2 cents... Yes - Linux mdadm works great in an ESXi All-in-one-box. I had that running for nearly a year and it was the so far best experience I had. I just recommend to spend some money on good hardware. I have a SuperMicro X9SCM-F + Xeon 1230 CPU + 16GB ECC RAM + 2x Intel SASUC8i controllers. ZFS is a great file system. So I set up a 2nd PC, running Solaris and attached 6x1TB drives from WD/Hitachi. The next morning, I grabbed my MacBook Air, logged into the Solaris temp server - and saw many many errors. The result: I lost about 1.3TB of data. To come back to topic: just be sure the mainboard supports ECC RAM, get them! OpenSolaris derived ZFS NAS/ SAN (Nexenta*, OpenIndiana, Solaris Express) How to setup a ready to run OpenSolaris derived ZFS Storage Server +configure it + add a WEB-GUI within minutes more: napp-it mini HowTo 1 - setup a ZFS Server How to setup a All-In-One Server - VMware ESXi based + virtualized ZFS-SAN-Server + virtualized network Switch + other VM's like Windows, Linux.. more: napp-it mini HowTo 2 - setup a all-in one Server with main focus on free systems i will keep this initial post up to date, please re-read from time to time !!
ZFS is a revolutionary file-system with nearly unlimited capacity and superior data security thanks to copy on write, checksums with error-autofix, raid z1-3 without the raid5/6 write hole problem, with a online filecheck/ refresh feature and the capability to create nearly unlimited data snapshots without delay or initial space consumption. ZFS Boot snapshots are the way to go back to former OS-states. ZFS is stable, availabe since 2005 and used in Enterprise Storage Systems from Sun/ Oracle and Nexenta. 1. commercial options. New home NAS and Hypervisor setup.