Thinking of using ZFS/FBSD for a backup system

[Lorenzo Perone]

On 08.07.2008, at 08:15, mike wrote:

> Just wanted to sanity check here before investing some money and time
> into this solution...
>
> Also if anyone wants to reply to me off list with hardware that works
> well for FBSD 7 + ZFS I'd be grateful :)


On 09.07.2008, at 13:17, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> ZFS is what it is, several of us have shown that it is possible to  
> tune memory parameters to make it fit into a FreeBSD kernel, and  
> users can either take that for what it's worth, or decide that ZFS  
> is not for them.
>
> Kris


I know I'm definitively NOT going to make any friends here this
way ;) BUT: At the present time, my impression is that if you
need/want  to put anything business-critical on a ZFS pool: go
opensolaris. I got to know it on a SUN box, at least the
bit to run and compile a few things, and it was  definitively
a pain compared to the good old FreeBSD hier(7). But for as far
as zfs goes, I can sleep at night. Not that I wouldn't prefer the
other way around, I'm one of those whom others have to stop
before he starts installing FreeBSD on everything that has a CPU
and runs as a server ;)

I'm sure zfs on FreeBSD will be at least as stable (and,
easilly, even better performing) as soon as pjb has the time to
share his newest patches. I'll be one of the first csup'ping
on RELENG_7 as soon as it's done. It's a way too sexy
filesystem not to do so, and that's the reason why this kind
of threads pop up regularly...

As for my current experience, I have a box that backs up two
offices every  night and snapshots several filesystems, which
is now running stably  a zfs pool since about 2 months
(which is almost a record for that box).

It's a 7.0-STABLE #8 Sat Apr 26 10:10:53 CEST 2008, amd64
with 2 GB of RAM and the following  in /boot/loader.conf:

vm.kmem_size=900M
vm.kmem_size_max=900M
vfs.zfs.arc_max=300M
vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=1

However I'm happy that it is down the corridor, so if the
whole thing gets stuck again, or panics, I can still
watch it while it reboots on the console...

BTW I can't recommend to rely on ufs snapshots while waiting
for zfs to become stable - I tried and it almost destroyed
that filesystem after a few runs (besides, it takes ages to
finish a snapshot, compared to zfs).


Regards,

(and long live FreeBSD, it's half my life atm)

Lorenzo