After Oracle has expressed its intention to discontinue OpenSolaris now its time for OpenSolaris users to think about what to do. I haven’t made my mind yet where I will move my Homeserver to. Right now I’m consindering these choices:
- Solaris 11
- FreeBSD 8.1
- Nexenta Core Platform 3.0
Of course you can wait for Solaris 11 to appear, but this release will not be free for my use (non-commercial). So I am not really considering it as the license is to expensive for my use case. So the race is really between FreeBSD and NCP - and I haven’t made up my mind which is better. I will evaluate both on this set of criteria:
- ZFS and DTrace functionality
- Stability
- Security mechanisms
- Broad x86 hardware support
- Broad set of open source tools as part of the distribution
- Availability of Netatalk, NFS, CIFS
- SMF-like service management
- Xen Dom0 support
Any guidance is highly appreciated.
Today I was working with a customer who wants to built a Solaris 10 / ZFS server node with a lot of internal disks for file serving purposes.
I suggested a Dell PowerEdge R510 with a PERC H700 Controller and 12 internal 2 TB SATA HDDs (3.5”). Each HDD will be setup as RAID0 set on the PERC H700 RAID Controller and handed out to ZFS to built a RAID-Z2 on top of it. In addition the R510 will incorporate two internal 2.5” drives to make up for a mirrored operating system (rpool).
The PERC H700 is 6GB SAS RAID-Controller with two internal ports (4 lanes each) to drive the disks within the R510. It’s brother is the H800 with two external ports (not used here). The R510 is two socket (Intel Xeon 5600 Series), 2U server with up to 128 GB of memory, 14 internals disks (12x 3.5” Hotplug, 2x 2.5” Internal) and 3 PCIe-Slots.
The fileserver will have 16 GB of memory and one Intel Xeon X5660 CPU (2.66 GHz, 6 Cores). An option is to raise memory to 48 GB which would be required if you want to deduplicate the entire disk capacity and keep the block tables in memory (required for performance).
Summary: the Dell PowerEdge R510 is a perfect server for anyone that wants to built a ZFS-based Server. While it is not listed yet on the Oracle/Sun Solaris HCL it is working with Solaris (there are drivers for all integrated components).
