ZFS on OpenSolaris or FreeBSD
I have no real experience with ZFS, and very limited experience with Solaris & FreeBSD. After reading numerous articles about ZFS, I'm pretty convinced ZFS is something I want to use for my home disk array (16-20 disks).
I'm trying to decide between Solaris and FreeBSD. I have no real preference but I don't know the differences between the two.
Can someone point out the differences or benefits/advantages of one OS over the other?
EDIT:
To avoid being "off-topic", I'll rephrase my question(s):
- What features do Solaris (or FreeBSD) have over the other in terms of ZFS support?
- Are there significant performance differences between Solaris vs. FreeBSD vs. other in terms of ZFS?
I recommend Nexenta or NexentaStor for this purpose. NexentaStor is more of an appliance and doesn't require heavy Unix knowledge. It features a web GUI. But if weren't using either, I'd go the Solaris or Solaris-derivative route (Illumos, OpenIndiana).
I'm biased toward FreeBSD so I'd point you to FreeNAS. It's the same idea as Nexenta and others above (those are Solaris based, FreeNAS is FreeBSD based).
OpenSolaris/Solaris/forks, has a higher learning curve than FreeBSD; though the web interfaces do a pretty good job of abstracting the underlying complexities. FreeBSD has an extensive Ports collection making adding over 22,000 pieces of software a breeze. Both are rock solid and proven operating systems. If you're familiar with Linux, FreeBSD is going to share more CLI commands than Solaris; but that only matters if you're using the CLI.
Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, this Answer is mine; feel free to disagree.
I was in your situation about a year ago. At the time I went with OpenSolaris, and about a month later Sun/Oracle killed it, so don't go there. Their packages haven't been updated since 2009.
Illumos and OpenIndiana look promising but I was a bit put off by the flux of the community. Since everything was ported from OpenSolaris and since that coder resource was taken away, I have concerns as to their stability and security in the long run.
It is of my opinion that right now FreeBSD is your best bet for ZFS. Personally I set up Ubuntu and run it in user-space via FUSE but I see very poor performance with that. Should I redo my setup, I would have gone with FreeBSD.
There is also some good ZFS on Linux development going on currently. Last I checked it didn't have proper POSIX support but it looks like they have made progress on that.
Anyway best of luck with your decision and let us know how it goes!
Solaris 11 Express (build 151a), which is, along with notable licensing changes, the new name of OpenSolaris has the latest ZFS implementation available. The fact its source code hasn't been released prevents FreeBSD, Illumos, Fuse or native Linux and other OSes with ZFS implementation based on OpenSolaris build 147 or older to be on par.
The most visible enhancement that has been introduced in Solaris 11 Express ZFS but is missing from all other implementations including FreeBSD is ZFS encryption.
Being employed by Nexenta is a certain bias. Though, that said I certainly recommend trying it out. Community Edition of our product is very good, and it keeps getting better. With enough RAM you can enable enterprise features like data deduplication, compression, snapshots, cloning, etc. All are native to ZFS. With dedup and compression you could end up with a multi terabyte system with only a few disks.