OpenSolaris 2008.11 - NAS testing

I have been doing some testing of OpenSolaris 2008.11 - as a NAS.

Some reasons for investigating this, and learning yet another operating system, has been due to not being entirely happy with some of my Linux/CentOS NAS setups - for the following reasons:

• Documentation for all the bits I needed to setup are scattered all over the internet
• There are so many variations/flavours of Linux, again, makes finding the correct documentation a pain
• Active Directory, Windows ACLs - kind of work after hours of playing around. Not perfect.

So after reading lots on OpenSolaris, and seeing the second major release come out, I decided to look a bit under the hood - and I have been impressed. From what I have seen so far from Sun's efforts on OpenSolaris, it is a viable alternative to Linux (as a NAS), at the right cost - free! Some advantages:

• Quick to find the documentation I need - documentation can be found at or is linked from http://www.opensolaris.org and http://www.opensolaris.com
• Sun has built CIFs with AD/Windows ACL integration - clearly documented (well must easier to find than for Linux)
• There is less steps needed to set everything up compared to previous Linux solutions I put together
• ZFS - snapshotting!
• iSCSI sharing of ZFS volumes - bring on some VMWare ESXi love!
• This is based on Solaris - its gotta be rock solid - at least it makes me think it is vs my previous Linux solutions

To get myself up to speed with OpenSolaris features - I downloaded the trial version of NexentaStor - installed it on hardware and VMs and just played around. Nexenta has rolled their own version on OpenSolaris, put a web gui on it, and optimised it for NAS operation.

The web based GUI for configuring everything is super simple to use. I think I will option this product in future for clients wanting multi-terrabyte NAS/iSCSI solutions. Previously, I have implemented several Open-E solutions - not a bad product, but I really wish it has the flexibility of ZFS and the simplicity of OpenSolaris AD to unix user and group mappings!

For soho clients, they may not want to fork out for the cost of NexentaStor, so I decided to learn OpenSolaris and set it up like NexentaStor. Solaris Express Community Edition does include some ZFS web gui tools, kind of like a subset of stuff you can do on NexentaStor, but it hasn't been rolled into OpenSolaris yet.

Future posts to come from my OpenSolaris testing... Some Amazon EC2 OpenSolaris testing... Some Amanda backup software testing...