Dilemma! I’m setting up a home NAS … but do I return to my FreeBSD roots or shall I try something new and go with OpenSolaris?
Both are Open Source, both have excellent communities etc. And most importantly? Both have ZFS.
Well, my Dad always told me to be systematic! A clear mind = a clear purpose. So a small comparison follows after the break …
| FreeBSD | Open Solaris |
| Advantages:
+ Does not need to have entire hard disks dedicated to zpool’s in order to enable write caching on disks. This is fundamental in ZFS’s performance. OpenSolaris doesn’t really recommend using Partitions to install ZFS on (“Slices” in the OpenSolaris parlance). + FreeBSD Ports collection is one of the most comprehensive repositories of OSS software. And it comes customised to your setup – awesome! |
Advantages:
+ Learn Solaris / ZFS from the “Source”. OpenSolaris is one of the more “pure” of Unix-like systems available, and it’s Open Source. + Familiarity with OpenSolaris now = bonus when Solaris 11 beta is released this 2009 (OpenSolaris = a kind of Solaris 11 beta) + Stable, predictable release cycle. A new version every 6 months = helps sysadmins plan their upgrades. |
| Disadvantages:
- Compiling packages from source through the Ports system means that your FreeBSD install is nearly one-of-a-kind. Could make replicating bugs and troubleshooting issues tricky. This may be why Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/SuSE and other binary package-based Linuxes are thought to be “easier” to administrate. - Irregular release cycle. |
Disadvantages:
- Recommends to use entire hard disks for zpools. - Requires a lot of jumping through a lot of hoops to get root booting from CompactFlash cards, to snure that OpenSolaris thus can dedicate entire drives to ZFS without using partitions (Slices). Note: you have to run “pfexec installgrub” if you don’t have the permissions to write the GRUB files. |
At the end of the day, OpenSolaris failed to install on the CompactFlash card. I think my ASUS P5KPL-AM does not have good support for booting from USB devices. Funnily, my Dell Latitude E6400 seems to have better support for booting from USB devices. Oh well – I should’ve picked a better motherboard.
So taking the performance hit on OpenSolaris and disabling the disk’s write cache is just not acceptable.
My next project –> using FreeBSD on my home NAS! I can live with the irregular release cycle, since my machine will be on FreeBSD-7 for 2-3 years, and I don’t foresee myself upgrading to FreeBSD 8 until this hardware gets refreshed.
And I think I can manage the unpredictability of ports through ZFS snapshots and clones.
Some more FreeBSD goodness:
FreeBSD w/ ZFS – the last word on operating system file systems.
No related posts.
Try FreeNAS which is based off of FreeBSD.
http://www.freenas.org
-Concolor
Good thinking concolor … I’ll give FreeNAS a go when I have an opportunity. Thanks for the tip!
Do you know if enabling write caching with slices is now possible? These two threads seem to indicate that it might be possible to manually enable write caching anyway, but I’m not sure if I’m reading right:
http://osdir.com/ml/os.solaris.opensolaris.zfs/2006-07/msg00510.html
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=89123
I’m picking hardware for a (preferably OpenSolaris) ZFS box, and it’d be simpler if I knew that I could mix drives of different sizes without wasting space.
Heya glassdarkly,
1. Based on what I researched – FreeBSD enables the write cache on all drives, no matter what file system is on them (UFS / ZFS).
2. Mixing drives of different sizes will get awkward with OpenSolaris, since it expects the drives in a zpool to be the same. e.g. if you have 3x disks in a Raid-Z pool and the 3rd disk is a bit bigger … from what I understand the extra space won’t get used until the other 2x disks in the pool are upgraded to same size (or larger).
3. If mixing different drives is important for you – you could have a look @ Drobo. You lose some cool ZFS features though. (Snapshots, rollback, copy on write, enterprise-grade checksumming).