Gustav Brock
gustav at cactus.dk
Sat Mar 2 06:13:39 CST 2013
Hi Jim I faught a couple of years ago setting up a OpenSolaris server with ZFS for the reasons you mention. It should serve as iSCSI storage and also as file server for our Windows workstations. But I had to give up. Having it integrated in an Active Directory was (is?) close to impossible, and configuring iSCSI targets is not for anyone but true experts. The main reason is lack of documentation. You have to collect bits and pieces from here and everywhere some of which you later find out is outdated. Even worse is that this kind of experience makes you feel stupid. I am not but, believe me, somewhere in the process you will sit back and wonder if you have chosen the right business. After a year or so (on and off, of course) I fired up two Windows R2 servers, and in less than a week I had them running at our two locations with RAID, shadow copy to separate drives, backup systems at both ends to other drives, fully synchronized via DFS, individual user rights via AD (also synchronized), a secondary local backup system, remote backup, and iSCSI targets at one end using the free Starwind software. So ZFS may be excellent in a xNIX environment but be prepared if you wish to integrate it in a Windows environment. /gustav >>> accessd at shaw.ca 02-03-13 1:48 >>> ZFS may be the ultimate file system for any OS. It features are quite incredible. ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software. If you are worry about the integrity of the file system, it is supposed to be the most stable FS in the world. If you are concerned that it can not access sufficient storage don't worry. A ZFS file system can store up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes (ZB), where a 1 zettabyte = 1,073,741,824 terabytes ...much larger than most of our MS Access MDBs. http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html It can install on a number of Distros but unfortunately, it is not supported by Windows Servers...yet. Jim