
The server which among other things holds my email runs Debian/Wheezy for the Dom0 and most DomUs. It's running Xen for virtualisation and ZFS for data storage. Currently I have some problems, the hardware is defective and has started spontaneously rebooting. This is really bad but a combination of ECC RAM and ZFS means that the risk of data loss is low, but uptime isn't good. The server needs to be replaced so now is a good time to consider other changes. ZFS is not well supported on Linux due to license issues. There are two aspects of this which are particularly important to me, one is that I've found ZFS to cause the kernel to OOM in situations where I think it shouldn't (EG a server with 4G of RAM doing a light Samba load). The other is that ZFS doesn't always start properly on boot so I need to hack the init scripts to make sure it's mounted before starting daemons that depend on it (which doesn't always work, see my message about MySQL). I believe that my coding skills are up to the task of making ZFS work as I desire. But no-one is going to pay me to do that and I don't feel inclined to waste hobby time on work that won't benefit the FOSS community. For reliable data storage on Linux the options are ZFS and BTRFS. The down- side of BTRFS is that it is new and most distributions don't support it as well as one wants for production code. But Oracle apparently support it well. Oracle are also really into Xen and should be able to give better MySQL support than anyone else. The options I'm considering at the moment are using Oracle Linux for the Dom0 and using Debian for the Dom0 with an Oracle kernel. Both of those should be good for running BTRFS and Xen. Debian with an Oracle kernel will make kernel upgrades a little painful but it means I don't have to change the rest of the OS configuration (I've run Debian systems with CentOS kernels before). A complete Oracle OS will work well together but it means I have to change everything to a different OS, admittedly that won't be so hard as the Dom0 does little other than managing DomUs and running MySQL. Any suggestions? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/