ZFS versus RAID+LVM

[mir]

nas4free and FreeNas are, except for the GUI, more or less identical. nas4free is a fork from FreeNas 7 (0.7) so they share the same code base. OpenFiler does not compare to either FreeNas or nas4free - ZFS is missing. Apart from this OpenFiler seems abandoned since no commits or updates has been made since April 2011. A core infrastructure component without any development or updates for 1½ years is not a candidate to me!

 

[BiagioParuolo]

I agree with you on OpenFiler. I'll try nas4free ...
How is the support for nas4free and freeNas?
On freeNas there is a good PDF doc.

 

[mir]

nas4free and freenas community edition provides the same kind of support - the user forum and wiki.

I agree that the PDF on freenas is very god and comprehensive. The god thing is that most of the information can be used on nas4free as well

 

[mir]

Hi,
IMHO is openmediavault more for homeuse. But an debian based solution is http://www.openattic.org - run's well (but I haven't tried zfs-stuff).
An advantage of an linux based nas is the good support for 10G-Nics - this was not so good with older freenas-versions. Perhaps it's ok now with the FreeBSD9?!

Udo

openattic seems a bit "germanorum solum" but since I have German ancestors my German is sufficient to be able to read the manuals and guides on the forum. Regarding the ZFS stuff. The Linux implementation is fuser based which has a considerable impact on performance. The implementation is also still categorized as experimental. I agree with you regarding openmediavault. It also seems like it is more or less a one man project. His is working hard though since I discovered some bugs and shortcomings which his resolved the same day! kudos.

 

[mir]

Check openindiana + nappit as an alternative to FreeNAS.

I am doing some preliminary tests of openindiana+nappit. My first impression is that it is a bit more heavy on hardware requirements compared to Freenas/nas4free - will in run from a USB stick?. I think it is a strange choice to use apache instead of ngienx or lighthttp. I maybe also already have discovered a bug which caused an extra hour of putting up an iSCSI target. It seems nappit does not activate the targit for discovery since the targit was not provided to initiators until I manually did a "devfsadm -i iscsi" from the command line. Performance wise it is the same as freenas/nas4free but configuration of iscsi is more straite forward on freenas/nas4free. I will do a proper test but so fare the choice seems to be between freenas and nas4free.

 

[mir]

My excitement with ZFS just grows and grows

Make sure that zfs_enable="YES" is in rc.conf, restart/etc/rc.d/mountd, then the mountd command will use both /etc/exports and /etc/zfs/exports. So to do nfs with ZFS, all you need to do is:

1. add zfs_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf
2. restart mountd (i.e. /etc/rc.d/mountd restart)
3. add your zfs shares: zfs sharenfs=on myzpool/test1 zfs sharenfs="-maproot=root -alldir -network 10.0.0.3 -mask 255.255.255.255" myzpool/test2

NOTE: sharenfs=on creates a nfs share that is available to everyone. You should now be able to mount the zfs nfs filesystems on othersystems or locally. mount -t nfs myserver:/myzpool/test1 /mnt Unlike /etc/exports, zfs nfs shares are available immediately, no need to restart mountd.