FreeBSD ZFS as a NAS/server?

F

forrie

It's been a very long time since I've been in the FreeBSD world - where I work, we are mostly all Linux.

We have a conundrum whereby our SunFire x4540 which runs Solaris 10 is fast becoming a PITA, and we're running into a situation where we'd prefer to use another os that provides the same functionality with regard to ZFS. Due to the obvious complications with Linux, FreeBSD becomes another choice. But, I'm wondering if the code is Enterprise/stable for this type of purpose.

I've never heard of anyone installing FreeBSD on a Sunfire x45xx series -- anyone with experience there, please speak up. I can see some driver issues cropping up, at least.

Failing that, we could get another architecture all together and ditch this. Solaris has been such a friggen headache, for years. I hate it :-)

So, basically I'm looking for feedback, war stories, info, etc.


Thanks.
 
Openindiana? Its likely to be a "known headache" rather than jumping to a totally different platform and losing the built in support in ZFS for NFS and CIFS?
 
First of all, FreeBSD was ready for production usage long before Solaris 10 was out. As for SunFire 4500, I did that. Didn't try ZFS though. But I use FreeBSD/ZFS on all my storages, and it's fine. You should just go with FreeBSD/AMD64 version, since it's just normal Opterons. Theoretically when you'll reinstall the system from Solaris to FreeBSD you will be able to just 'zpool import' your data into FreeBSD and that would be it, but that depends on some factors.
 
I don't have such hardware, but I'm using several FreeBSD machines with ZFS everywhere and I've got also a FreeNAS box running on AMD64 and all work fine.
Besides this, if you don't want to move far away from the Solaris branch I would give a try at OpenIndiana or Nexenta, which are both based on the was OpenSolaris.
 
I don't question whether FreeBSD itself is ready for production; years ago, that's the only OS I used in several companies I helped start up.

Alas, this shop is Linux.

Our larger goal is to get rid of Solaris... something I'm all too happy to do, as I can't stand it.

That being said, if FreeBSD/amd64 would work well on this architecture, I will be all for it. Curious, were there any issues with device drivers and disk controllers etc?
 
If they're a Linux shop already, you may have better luck testing out the zfsonlinux modules. That way, you get the same software/management tools on all systems, but still benefit from ZFS.

However, anyone that likes the centralised development and control facilities of Solaris would feel more at home with FreeBSD. Especially if they use DTrace, which isn't available on Linux.
 
Hi,

As no one seems to be able to vouch for driver compatibility with your hardware, apart from obviously just testing it which you can't do without a spare Sun server you should check the network interface cards and disk controllers against the FreeBSD hardware compatibility list. I don't think Sun x86 servers tend to have any exotic hardware so I'd guess you'll be fine but have a look and if you have any doubts post back.

With respect to using FreeBSD as a NAS server, it should be able to do pretty much what your Solaris system is doing, ie: NFS, SMB (via Samba), iSCSI target etc etc. If this is going into a mission critical system then you should of course pilot all of these with whatever clients you are using as interaction of things like NFS client/server seems to vary quite a lot and I have heard of people complaining about FreeBSD NFS server with Linux NFS clients...

And on a side note, I love Solaris (though only used it on SPARC kit), what has been the major issue for you? Not possibly a hardware issue is it?

cheers Andy.
 
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