Linux – OpenSolaris ZFS barebones for NAS

filesystemslinuxopensolarisxfszfs

I've been tasked to suggest a NAS replacement for our aging fileserver at work, its currently running Linux with XFS (using LVM).

We're a very small company of 5 folks, so we're using commodity hardware (2GhzCore2, 8GbRAM and about 4TB worth of HDDs for the new build).

I was looking into OpenSolaris (I come from a Debian/RHEL background) and love what I see of ZFS, but I want to install a headless bare-essential version of OpenSolaris. This means no X, Gnome or any of the gui applications, but I'm not able to find a way of doing it.

Essentially we use this 'all-in-one' box for the following:

  • NAS/FileServer, about 2TB right now, used by all our Win32 hosts (lots of large PSD/Premier files!)
  • Subversion for hosting our source files
  • VMWare Server (right now 1.0) to use as a deployment for Windows 2003 and other OSs.

Another box is our gateway (OpenBSD) that tackles DHCP etc, I just need this box to host our content, run our Continuous integration (TeamCity, Confluence and Jira) inside a few VMs (seperate Glassfish installs) and also run Windows 2003 instancese for SQL Server.

Do you think its possible for me to install a cut down version of OpenSolaris (not Nextena) and use it for its ZFS love and setup Xen to use as a virtualisation manager for our virtual needs?

I realise 8Gb RAM may not be enough, it will be bumped up to 16 soon. I'm just a bit lost into wondering why we have to have Gnome for OpenSolaris installs 🙁

Best Answer

Definitely go with OpenSolaris for your NAS. Lots of options there, and ZFS can't be beat.

For virtualization, I can think of two options off the top of my head:

  1. Use VirtualBox on OpenSolaris. It's come a long way, and I recall seeing something about a web based management utility for managing headless guests. Ah, found it: VBoxWeb
  2. If you must use VMWare, get a second box dedicated as a VM hypervisor, use the OpenSolaris box as a SAN, and export the VM storage via iSCSI.

I would suggest running the storage and hypervisor as separate physical boxes either way you go, otherwise performance will suffer. ZFS likes lots of RAM.

OpenSolaris doesn't have a true "minimal" install as of yet, but they're working on it: OpenSolaris 2009.06 JeOS Prototype. The approach most admins have taken thus far has been to just remove what they don't want after the install is finished.

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