Comment by kjs3
6 years ago
Yeah...I use FreeBSD for file servers because I don't have to even pay attention this constant ZFSonLinux drama. I treat them like almost like appliances. Linux servers are more than happy to use them on the back-end.
6 years ago
Yeah...I use FreeBSD for file servers because I don't have to even pay attention this constant ZFSonLinux drama. I treat them like almost like appliances. Linux servers are more than happy to use them on the back-end.
how do you structure that? block images served by iscsi? shares served by nfs/samba?
All of the above, depending on what I'm trying to accomplish. Usually Samba for Windows clients and general bulk storage (pretty much everything can do CIFS mounts at some basic level these days), NFS for *nix and VMWare clients (esp where I can leverage NFSv4), iSCSI for various block image needs, scp/sftp/rsync. All of this is basic out of box for FreeBSD.
In operations, I treat them as semi-black-box (grey-box?) appliance where they only do the file storage function and are moral equivalents of Network Appliance NAS boxes. I don't try to convince the Linux or Windows teams to migrate other workloads to FreeBSD, and mostly don't want them to since that would mean Yet Another app environment to support.
FreeBSD has a really efficient network stack, so I can attach the FreeBSD stores at 10GB (usually, 2-4 bonded 10GB links) and it keeps up fine. I I have colleagues who are doing the same with 40GB links (40-160BG aggregate) to backbone networks, and apparently there are many shops hooking up FreeBSD with 100GB links. Limiting factor seems to be ZFS and the storage subsystems supporting it, not network, which is interesting, but I don't have the ability to benchmark the 40GB and higher stuff.