ZFS? Large storage solution?

[Trifid]

A friend has moved his home server to Vail due to planning on using the pooled storage solution. He set it up and really likes it but has now discovered that it only supports 8GB RAM and a single processor. He has 16GB RAM and dual processors...

Am I right in thinking ZFS pools all HDD into a single usable drive? If RAIDZ is used to provide redundancy (single parity), can you mix the sizes of HDD? I.e. like a Drobo and when you want to increase the size of the pool, pull out a lower capacity drive and replace it with a larger capacity one?

Assuming I've got the right end of the stick on ZFS, which I'm not sure I have. Is the best implementation of ZFS Opensolaris? Other than storage he hosts a couple of VM on the server (VMware) which will need to moved from his current windows setup.

Thanks.

 

[Trifid]

Yes, ZFS with FreeBSD is epic.

Aslongs as you have 4gb of ram or more, it eats pretty much what you give it.

If you mix hdd sizes it'll obviously use the size of the smallest disk ( for all of them in the array ) so say you have 4x 500gb and 1x 250gb it'll treat *all* the disks as 250gb.

Replacing disks with ZFS is still a work in progress, so really the best way to currently do it without comprising the array is to backup the data and re-create the array.

Ah, so you can't really mix and and match HDD like a Drobo can? Where you get all the usable space. Whether using ZRAID or not. I.e. 2TB +2TB +2TB +1TB +1TB = 8TB or 6TB with parity.

He currently has 2 copies of all data but wants a single accessible 'drive' with all the data on instead of having for example 'videos 1' and 'videos 2' spread over 2 2TB disks. If that makes sense?

 

[Trifid]

Looks complicated.

Vail was perfect except for the CPU and memory limitations. The memory is there for running virtual machines.

To be honest I can see him getting a Drobo before the end of the year.