ZFS - Building, Testing, and Benchmarking
by Matt Breitbach on October 5, 2010 4:33 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Linux
- NAS
- Nexenta
- ZFS
Demise of OpenSolaris?
You may have heard some troubling news about the fate of OpenSolaris recently. Based on some of the rumors floating around, you might think OpenSolaris is going away, never to be seen again. Admittedly, OpenSolaris has never been an open source project in quite the same way that Linux has. Sun launched the OpenSolaris project to help promote its commercialware Solaris product. Sun seemed to do a decent job of managing the OpenSolaris project, but Sun is no longer in charge. The project is now at the mercy of Oracle.
The OpenSolaris Governing Body (OGB) has struggled to get Oracle to continue to work with the OpenSolaris project. Oracle’s silent treatment has gotten so bad that the OGB threatened to dissolve itself and return control of the OpenSolaris community to Oracle on August 23 if Oracle did not appoint a liaison to the community by August 16, 2010. It is pretty safe to assume that Oracle, clearly a for profit company, would benefit more from allowing the OGB to dissolve. That would give Oracle the option to do what ever they wanted with OpenSolaris, including simply killing the project.
At this point, two possible outcomes seem the most likely. One possible outcome is that Oracle will continue to offer OpenSolaris but will tighten its grip over the direction of the project. Perhaps Oracle would use the opportunity to make some technical changes within OpenSolaris to limit the scope of the product so as not to compete directly with commercialware offerings.
The other outcome is that a fork will occur in the project, possibly resulting in several different projects. Regardless of Oracle, OpenSolaris appears to be living on through the Illumos project located at http://www.illumos.org/ - There hasn't been much activity yet in the Illumos project, but it's only been announced for a few weeks. We will be closely monitoring this to see if it will be a suitable replacement for OpenSolaris. Illumos was initiated by Nexenta employees in collaboration with OpenSolaris community members and volunteers. While Nexenta does sponsor some of the work, Illumos is independent of Nexenta. Illumos aims to be a common base for multiple community distributions. It is run by the community on a system of meritocracy. Distributions like Nexenta, Belenix and Schillix will move to using Illumos as the base for their distributions, and other distributions have shown interest as well.
Personally, I don’t think the situation is as dire as some people suggest. Oracle now owns MySQL as well as OpenSolaris, yet millions of us continue to use these products. If Oracle does over exert control to the point that it chokes off these open source products, then we can always resort to forking the code and getting behind the new open source projects.
As far as using OpenSolaris, I don’t see Oracle’s ownership as a reason to give up on using OpenSolaris. If you are considering deploying a ZFS based
A final note on the possible demise of OpenSolaris is that OpenSolaris may now be officially dead. According to an internal Oracle announcement that was posted into some mailing lists, Oracle is killing off OpenSolaris and replacing it with Solaris 11 Express. Additionally, Oracle claims they will continue to release open source snapshots of Solaris after each major release instead of releasing nightly builds, but that does not sound like a typical open source project.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
102 Comments
View All Comments
mbreitba - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Thanks for the comment on the ZIL.As far as using the X25-E's as ZIL devices - when we built the box initially, the X25-E's were the best choice at the time. Future builds will probably include a capacitor-backed SSD.
James5mith - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
For what it's worth, we are currently using roughly 16 of the Supermicro 846-E1 chassis in our storage solutions.Drive numbering is from bottom to top, left to right. Don't know if this helps or not.
5 11 17 23
4 10 16 22
3 9 15 21
2 8 14 20
1 7 13 19
0 6 12 18
badhack - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
I would be curious to know how the performance compares to traditional fs caching on Linux w/ ext3 or ext4 with same amount of memory and a few SSD drives.Maveric007 - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
There are a few options within Linux that would be pretty interesting to see. FS caching and the different schedulers that are available within Linux. Also I would throw out ext3 and replace that with ext4 and xfs. Redhat is now supporting xfs and there are just tons of tunables for xfs compared to the other file systems.badnews - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Thanks Matt, I've been following the build over at your blog and this is an excellent article to tie it all together. I hope you follow up with your "things we'd do differently" in future articles. I would also love to see some more benchmarking against more alternatives, e.g. Open-E, or even an off-the-shelf EqualLogic.Keep up the good work :)
Fallen Kell - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
Well, I know at least for Solaris 10.... I would suspect that OpenSolaris has it as well by now, since it has been out for at least 4 years that I know of...https://<host>:6789
mbreitba - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
You can install the ZFS Web GUI from the Solaris toolkit, but it isn't bundled into OpenSolaris. It is binary compatible, but it doesn't give any good options for iSCSI setup, as it only supported the old iSCSI target rather than the new COMSTAR target.sfc - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
How can you spend a page talking about how you aren't really worried about the future of Opensolaris, and then have half a paragraph mentioning "oh, btw, it's cancelled"? The project is clearly dead. They stopped releasing source almost a month ago. Oracle has made absolutely no guarantees about when or how source would be released in the future. For all we know, they could release only portions of Solaris Express, and do it months to years after the binaries drop.http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=...
I love ZFS/Opensolaris, I use it at home, but Opensolaris is dead.
Mattbreitbach - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
OpenSolaris is indeed dead as far as development goes, but it's still viable if you want to use the last build released which is what all of our performance figures are based on. I will be writing some companion articles to this one talking about not only the death of OpenSolaris, but it's alternative, OpenIndiana, and the Promise M610i used as a comparison in this article.andersenep - Tuesday, October 5, 2010 - link
The OpenSolaris project may be dead but ZFS and all the CDDL licensed code is still out there. Illumos, OpenIndiana and a few other distros are still out there and available. Oracle has stated they will continue to release source code after Solaris releases and will also provide binary preview releases in the form of Solaris Express. To say Solaris and ZFS are dead is pretty premature.Whatever happens, the existing code is out there. To call it dead is a bit premature. Sure the project that had the name 'OpenSolaris' has been canceled, but everything that made it up (minus a small few closed bits that have already been replaced) lives on.