I've been lamenting for a while now that I can't run ZFS under Linux. I know the fileserver has been getting a lot of hype lately, but I believe it is well deserved. After playing with a few of the features I'm mightily impressed. To get a good impression of what it is like take all the benefits of LVM, add a few new features, then make it easy to use and administer. See this article for more info.
I've had trouble lately in that it is only supported under Solaris. There are ports in the works, but nothing is stable yet outside the Solaris kernel. Fortunately for those of us who want to remain open source, there is OpenSolaris. Sadly, it doesn't support the Dell hardware I'm installing on.
Again, to my fortune, VMWare came to the rescue. I was able to get NexentaOS installed in VMWare Server on top of Debian and exporting wonderful ZFS volumes. The major caveat so far has been that NexentaOS doesn't support CIFS as far as I can tell, so I'm exporting the volumes to the Debian system through NFS and then exporting with Samba from there. Since the majority of my users are windows users that means I'll actually do most of my user administration in the Debian installation. So far it looks pretty good. We'll see how it works in practice.
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I followed a very similar route installing Nexenta in VMWare Server on my Gentoo server. The major problem I ran into was that support for using raw disks in VMWare is awful. VMWare was incapable of remembering the disk geometry from one run to the next. Every time I stoped the VM and restarted it, it would pop up a warning about the geometry changing, and all of the data on the raw disks was hosed. I was also annoyed that it would not support other block devices, like LVM2 logical volumes, as virtual disks.
If you can run Xen, that might be a better approach. Since the next release of FreeBSD will also have ZFS support, I'm going to wait for that and run FreeBSD inside a Xen domU guest.
I actually got it to work, but the real problem seems to be that ZFS really likes low-level hardware support which VMWare doesn't give it as well. The I/O rates just aren't there.
Since I have a Dell system here I'm just going to have to use hardware raid and run Linux I think. It's a pitty that there's such a great file system out there but it's pretty locked down by Sun.
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