Feb 24th, 2008
Solaris-based NAS and Virtualization at home
I run Zimbra’s mail server suite in an Ubuntu VM on my Mac. My only problem is that it eats up 512MB of my Mac Pro’s memory. I want to move it off so the first step is finding a new home for a Linux VM. I also want to move music and other archival data to something I don’t have to back up all the time.
Meet Solaris Nevada. The opensource community-developed version of Solaris 10 which includes Sun’s new xVM technology. Xen (VMware virtualization competitor) is built in to Solaris Nevada which means I can set up a virtual server on a Solaris x86 machine. I also get to reap the benefits of zfs. Using an 8-port PCI SATA controller (Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8) and 5 250GB SATA drives, I’ve got a RAID 5 protected SATA ZFS filesystem that can do nfs, cifs and iSCSI.
Putting all the bits and pieces together gives me a multi-purpose box that can now function as a fault-tolerant fileserver and box that can host virtual machines. Why did I pick Solaris? Because it’s free and ZFS is one of the best filesystems out there. I can make periodic snapshots of my ZFS filesystems and use the send/receive functionality to replicate it. Could I have done the same thing with Linux? ZFS isn’t out for Linux yet and Solaris has a number of other advantages. By the way, ZFS is in the Sun-supported version of Solaris 10 too.
On my list of TODOs is finish the migration from Ubuntu on the Mac to CentOS running on the Solaris box and move my iTunes library as well.
“Could I have done the same thing with Linux?”
Probably. LVM gives you writable snapshots. I’m not trying to dis Solaris or ZFS, or talk up Linux like a fanboy, but whenever you ask a rhetorical like that about Linux, the answer is usually “yes.”
Having said that, ZFS does look like it has a swag of fantastic features and I will definitely jump on board when it is stable and mature.
I am planning a home fileserver and ZFS was the first thing I thought of using. I especially like the self-healing of data, built-in RAID, quick setup and volume management.
But on further inspection, it lacks a few key features like adding devices to a RAID-Z pool, handling low memory situations gracefully and pool reduction.
OpenSolaris didn’t run well on my machines despite the HCL test programme reporting things as being okay. And FreeBSD’s implementation of ZFS still has a way to go before I would use it on my precious data.
So, at the end of the day, I’m gonna end up with Linux, dm-raid and LVM. I can expand the pool easily and I have confidence that my data is safe. Maybe in a year or two ZFS will give me that same confidence.
Cheers,
McP.