FreeNas 8 vs. OpenSolaris\OpenIndiana

[donwie63]

I have FreeNAS 8 loaded and love it. I was just reading a comparison of ZFS operating systems at zfsbuild.com and saw that FreeNAS 7 was waaaaay slower than other Solaris based OS's, so much slower that I don't know why anyone would want to use it and I was wondering if anyone compared FreeNAS 8 to other Solaris based OS's? I love the ease of use that FreeNAS has but I am open to switching to OpenIndiana, I have heard a lot of good things about it. Was the comparison faulty that they did?

Thanks

Don

 

[louisk]

I think there are 2 things that you need to consider separately.
1) speed of ZFS (don't compare something current and something ancient, it's a waste of time) - If your primary concern is speed, go for what ever is faster.
2) simple setup/administration - FreeNAS was not designed for somebody who wants to login to a commandline and perform system maintenance. It has a webby to make things easier for people who may not be familiar with the CLI, or who may not want to bother with it. If playing on the CLI is something you enjoy doing, perhaps FreeNAS isn't the right choice.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

FreeBSD 7 (which FreeNAS 0.7 was based on) had zfs version 7. Open Solaris has zpool version 28.
FreeBSD 8.2 (which FreeNAS 8 is currently based on) has zfs version 15. FreeBSD 8.3/9 which FreeNAS will eventually be based on has zfs version 28, the latest opensource version.

I personally would prefer FreeNAS/FreeBSD because it is a living project while OpenSolaris is a dead project that I believe Oracle stopped contributing to when they bought Sun Microsystems. Kind of sad... last stable release was June 1, 2009. I read somewhere that FreeBSD will fork zfs and continue modifying it for FreeBSD 10 but can't find this link anymore.

 

[Hexland]

I started out with Open Indiana, but switched over to FreeNAS when I discovered the lack of 4K sector support.

I have a large number of 2Tb WD EARS drives (and I don't have the cash to switch them out) -- so disk performance is severely degraded on Solaris Express / Open Indiana.

What annoyed me most, however, was the attitude of the devs on the forums regarding the matter... instead of patching it, or solving the problem (like BSD) - most of the responses I read were

"Well, no one should be using those drives for Enterprise solutions anyway... and in a year or two's time, it won't be a problem - manufacturers will be correctly reporting the sector sizes"

It was clear to me that their focus was not on Joe Blow home users, and support for the kind of issues that I would encounter would be limited

 

[wildpulse]

I built an OpenIndiana server about 6 months ago (v151a) with 6 WD 3TB low power zfs data drives configured as Raid Z2 (SATA-6 motherboard controller). Performance has been excellent with read & write benchmarks usually topping 110 MB/sec. With my FreeNAS server (on nearly identical hardware) I'm only getting about 65MB/sec transfers. FreeNAS is definitely easier to manage sharing across multiple protocols, but the kernel based CIFS/SMB, NFS and AFP in OpenIndiana is multi-threaded, unlike Samba in FreeNAS which is single threaded. OpenIndiana is on ZFS v28 so powerful replication of snapshots is trivial to accomplish. Deduplication is also available (although you need so much RAM/SSD space that it's not really worth it). I think the drive firmware can emulate smaller sector sizes transparently.