Wow, there's been a lot of replies and certainly a number of things have been cleared up, although some things have become even more confusing.
It seems like my hardware will be more than powerful enough, even taking under-clocking into account and what I thought was a paucity of RAM. It seems the notion of three separate RAID 1 arrays are not especially controversial although I will have to experiment with the best way to partition them and create the relevant pools. I wonder if I could cause these three arrays appear visible as one partition to the client systems? Talking of pools, I confess to finding this a truly confusing concept, especially when looking at Dan's reply, which though extremely useful, also gave me a headache as I tried to understand his disk provisioning whilst relating that to my own concept. What you have to bear in mind is that I come from a mindset used to NTFS and EXT based file systems, so ZFS is truly alien to me. When Dan explained his setup, he brought to my attention his 64GB root disk. Aha! I think, this is something I was considering, but then I come away thoroughly confused as I try to understand what his 52GB rpool is used for (and indeed, what is rpool?), wonder at the 4GB swap/dump (when using Linux I deliberately move the swap to a mechanical drive to reduce wear on the SSD) and became utterly perplexed as to how a 4GB ZIL qualifies as over-provisioned on an SSD (I thought that ZIL was a log device and therefore written to a lot, I had considered buying a Gigabyte i-RAM from the States to server this role). Also Dan, do you use an L2ARC at all, could an SSD be worthwhile for this? I did find the zones a little confusing too, but as I plan on setting up a virtual machine to practise on I'm sure I'll fathom things out soon enough. I think I can safely assume that my newer Windows clients will have no trouble writing and reading to the ZFS shares and older Windows clients may have to be presented with a Windows 2003 VM for that purpose which will be fine enough as long as there is enough horsepower to run it (I would assume there is). I do question how well KVM would run on this hardware as I have been left with the impression that under Illumos based systems KVM doesn't like AMD's virtualization hardware? And thanks to Volker for pointing out FreeNAS 8. I'm not ruling that out but I'm given to understand that NAS4Free will run as an embedded OS from a USB key, thus giving the 400GB drive over entirely to storage. That said I'm not settled yet on what OS to use for the secondary server and I will probably try a number of combinations. Thank you all for your help thus far, as I mentioned in my previous message, ZFS definitely seems like the way forward, it's just a matter of learning what to do and finding a way of doing it that I am happy with. ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
