Finding a New Fileserver OS: Step Two - Testing

Virtualbox Testing Setup(real setup):

1(4) CPU

1(4) Gig Ram

ide0,0: 16 gig hard drive-6 for OS, 10 for ZFS (80 gig OS drive)

ide0,1: DVDRom

ide1,0: 10 gig for ZFS

ide1,1: 10 gig for ZFS

(4x500Gig Sata)

Solaris

I've worked with Solaris before, but I can't say I enjoyed it. It was a lot of work to install, but has been running non-stop save power outages for a while now. It's actually remarkably efficient, and a rather slim kernel, but I really would like to use this box as a desktop now and then.

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris has come a long way. I mount the ISO, boot off the CD, it asks me to choose a kernel with GRUB(I choose x86 + gui), and then the machine boots into a full Gnome Desktop. Next a fancy graphical installer installs to the 6 gig partition with standard ZFS flawlessly. I can even play gnibbles in the VM. After a reboot, everything works perfectly. Creating the RaidZ pool was equally easy (for someone who knows the Solaris command-line). It even has a graphical package manager, not the same as aptitude, but I can deal.

Nexenta

Nexenta is supposed to be the Ubuntu of Solaris. However, it seems a lot like they repacked Solaris packages as DEBs. There's a ton of packages named SUNW....blahblahblah...blah...packagename. Creating a RaidZ pool was rather easy though, as it should be, and completed the creation in less than 30 seconds. However, Nexenta doesn't support ZFS compression or encryption, which is a huge bummer. ZFS compression, applied sparingly, often increases write speed at the expense of some minor CPU performance.

FreeBSD

Odd - I couldn't get FreeBSD to install in VirtualBox. Backburnered.

Linux2.6/Fuse

This worries me: http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/ So, it seems that ZFS/Fuse currently suffers from the Gigantic Raid Write Whole. You have to disable your drive write buffers if you're using anything like MD or LVM with it, which often makes things very slow. Backburnered.