FreeBSD + ZFS on a production server?

[Fabian Keil]

"Anders Häggström" <hagge.lists at intercorner.net> wrote:

> I plan to install a web server for production use and ZFS looks very
> interesting, especially since it has built-in support for RAID and
> checksum.
> 
> The hardware is already purchased, a 1U-casis with a PhemonX4 9550
> CPU, 4GB ECC RAM @ 800MHz and 2x500GB SATA disks and I am about to
> select the operating system to use.
> 
> The choice is probably between "Debian 4.0r3", "FreeBSD 7.0" and
> "OpenSolaris 2008.05". All of them have their pros and cons.

Just in case you assume that ZFS on OpenSolaris 2008.05
would be superior to ZFS on FreeBSD, this hasn't been my
experience.

On a system with an Athlon 1700+ and only 512 MB of RAM,
receiving snapshots on OpenSolaris renders the GUI pretty
much useless.

On FreeBSD ZFS operations can cause delays as well, but it's
significantly better than on OpenSolaris, even though FreeBSD's
ZFS pool lies on a geli-encrypted gmirror while OpenSolaris uses
the disk directly.

Note that the system is below Sun's recommended specifications
for ZFS, though. Things may look differently on more powerful
systems.

> I think Debian / Linux, almost falls off because it lacks support for
> native ZFS and I have not found any alternative filesystem that offer
> checksums on the fly.
> 
> My main question is: How is the support for ZFS on FreeBSD? Is it
> sufficiently stable and fast enough to be used in production yet?

It probably depends on your workload, you'll find several complaints
in the archives. It works fine for me, but I haven't tried it on web
servers yet. If I were to install a web server today, though,
I'd definitely go with ZFS (on FreeBSD).

> If not, is there any alternative filesystem that offers checksums on
> the fly or other similar technology to reduce the risk of a corrupt
> filesystem that at the same time plays well with software RAID (RAID-1
> in particular)?

You can use geli(8) for checksumming, it can be combined with gmirror
but unless with ZFS, you don't get automatic "self-healing".

Fabian
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