Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Sat Mar 2 09:55:02 CST 2013
Hi Gustav: " ...somewhere in the process you will sit back and wonder if you have chosen the right business... " and that is unusual in this business because? If I had a hundred dollars for every time I walked into a business and said to myself, "What am I doing here!", I would be very wealthy. Before I retired (semi-retired), my upline contractor would always be putting me on sites with no docs of any kind as I was expected to just wing it...once you have apparently "walked on water" it becomes an expectation. To my understanding, until recently ZFS was only compatible with one other system than OpenSolaris and that was OpenBSD...with some recent updates in the Linux kernel it is now compatible with all Linux distros. Also according to what I read/heard it works fine with a Samba server (which has its own Actively Directory and/or supports Windows AD but this of course is a recent offering now that Microsoft and Linux are working together) and now is fully compatible with both Linux/UNIX and Windows. There is a lot of versions of the ZFS product...isn't the latest version 25 or 26? ...over-night builds seem become the latest release. ;-) Aside: In a few years Microsoft, like Oracle now is, will be moving seriously into the Linux OSS world or they would not be spending so much money supporting products like Mono, Samba, Cassadra, Hadoop, even Linux kernel development...and many more. That is one of the main problems with a lot of these OS products; lack of documentation. That is where an active online community around any application is so necessary. I am always apprehensive of bleeding edge products but it does sound like you finally obtained a very good solution. The only reason to try ZFS would be because of the incredible features it affords...once running that is. Jim -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock Sent: Saturday, March 02, 2013 4:14 AM To: dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] The ZFS FS 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 _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com