VMWare and ZFS not acceptable

While I can get the system to run I find that the I/O rate with ZFS in VMWare is unacceptable, only about 10 MB/s on a four-disk raid 10. Even with direct access to the disk I believe that ZFS's desire to really own the spindles is not very compatible with VMWare's emulation. Xen my be an option, but at this point I'm just going to run with Linux and hardware raid as the system needs to go into production.

No hardware support? No problem.

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.