Gmirror/graid or hardware raid?

[Quartz]

> Paul, your jail/ZFS scenario sounds like a perfect dream, but despite the
> fact that all instances in this case will be FBSD, It must be a
>   VM environment because testing involves some solutions that run on windows
> and different linux distros.

Learning about jails isn't a bad thing, and since there's a chance you 
might end up using it later, it's worth looking into.


> Quartz, I'll be booting the host FBSD from a separate smaller drive and
> leave the main disks for the guests, so my plan is to do 2 sets of raid1
> arrays.

I'd encourage you to at least consider striping them together into a 
raid-10: that will really increase performance with no material 
difference in reliability, and it will give you more effective usable space.


>As for the fs, I'll try to improve my knowledge of ZFS until I can
> feel confident enough to solve any problem that may arise.

Fair enough, but being that this system IS a test bed, now might be a 
great opportunity to learn.


>do you think it would be ok to use one raid array with
> the regular ufs2 and the other with zfs?

There's no technical reason why not, you just won't really be using the 
system to it's fullest potential.