[rescue] OS for ZFS?

[Robert Novak]

I've run NexentaStor Community Edition (free, supports up to 16TB or 18TB
of storage) on a Dell deskside workstation/server (SC430, single core
Pentium or Celeron, 4GB RAM, two 1TB sata disks plus a flash drive for OS).
Not enough RAM to do dedupe, but it was pretty viable for mount points and
such..

NexentaStor is built on descendants of Solaris, so Zachary would probably
be relatively comfortable with it. And they do regular development on it so
it's not a dead platform.

If you can bump your Dell up to 4GB or more, and make sure the drive
controller is supported (see http://zfs.bz/NexentaHSL for details), you can
probably get a bit done with it.

If you really want to work on ZFS with all its features and want to put
some money behind the effort, you can probably get a fairly substantial
dedupe-able box with a HP Microserver, 8 or 16GB or RAM, and NexentaStor or
the like. That'd set you back about $350+drives. Maybe less on your
favorite online source for used hardware. There are some nice hack options
on the hardware side on that machine as well (add 4-6 hard drives, esata
cards, fc mode, etc).

Hope this helps. (No formal affiliation with Nexenta, although a friend is
Global TME there.)

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 10:07 AM, Zachary Giles <zgiles at gmail.com> wrote:

> Honestly, I still dont trust ZFS on anything but Solaris /
> OpenSolaris. Maybe I need to get over that, but I don't like to lose
> data :)
> Others thoughts on that?
>
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
> > On 25 Mar 2013, at 12:50, "Scott Newell" <newell+rescue at n5tnl.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> I'm wanting to build a (headless) machine to play with ZFS.  It won't be
> > doing much--light duty file server, some monitoring scripts, rsync
> backups of
> > our VPS, etc.  Looking through the junk pile here at work, I see an
> Ultra 60
> > (2 CPU, 1 or 2 GB ram, couple of drives) or an old Dell Precision
> workstation
> > (2.8GHz P4, 512 MB, couple of old SATA drives).  Does either feel like a
> > viable candidate?
> >>
> >> Any recommendations on an OS?  I've run OpenBSD and debian on them
> before,
> > so I don't anticipate driver problems.
> >
> > RAM will be an issue if you want to do say, deduplication but otherwise
> you
> > should be fine with the Ultra 60 for basic ZFS stuff I believe.  ZFS
> won't
> > even let you enable it on 512M RAM in BSDs if I recall correctly.
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> thanks!
> >> newell  N5TNL
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> > _______________________________________________
> > rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>
>
>
> --
> Zach Giles
> zgiles at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue