Goodbye ZFS?


ZFS my one true love

I've used ZFS at home since about 2007. Thats a long time for a technology. I have used it through Solaris 9, 10, 11, Nenenta, Illumos, at al. It is an amazing feat of engineering. Dtrace is another little thing i use, from time to time, on Solaris as well...but not so much in recent times.


Time for an annulment?

While I could say its been all roses, it hasnt. There have been issues with running third party software on solaris. FFMPEG was a beast in the early days to get compiled an running. I used my storage array for many things, and transcoding was one of them. I wanted to move away from running things like tversity on my desktop. I also wanted to get away form development on my desktop, so I started moving toward VMs for everything, which turned out to be the best thing ever....except for a few issues....USB support was shabby for awhile on virtualbox so deploying software onto a device was difficult (to say the least). Things have gotten better. I attempted to mitigate this by running an experiment. Trying to get iSCSI boot working on Windows Vista (and later, attempted with Win 7). I was partially there,  but later found out my pool, which was designed for long term, large file storage...wasnt cut out for the random I/O needed for an OS to run adequtely (I used a single vdev!!!).

Commodities are a beautiful thing

I am at a crossroads now. SSDs are cheap. Ram is cheap, Spinning Storage is cheap. I can now have a high performance development environment booted straight from my storage array. an environment that supports zfs snapshots and a host of  other ZFS features (de-dup, etc).

Why the long story about virtualization and Solaris? Well, i am looking to change my core OS. One option is to run ESXi Hypervisor and enjoy ZFS, but allow for me to run other virtual instances... I would no longer have to store them locally and could have them all centrally managed.

As I went down this road, I remembered that Windows has Hyper-v...and that RemoteFX for Windows Server 2012 allows for full local GPU use. Not only that, Microsoft has released a ZFS clone of sorts with ReFS and Storage Spaces. It has self healing and many other great features that I use on ZFS. Its missing "Free" Snapshots and its still unproven with large installations.


To Be continued!!





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