-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Jeremy Baron: ZFS version 28, including dedup, was integrated into FreeBSD head (9-CURRENT) in February. I imagine it will make it back into 8.x eventually, but although dedup is nice on paper, I'm not sure it's actually very useful. You need so much memory to cache the DDT (since putting it on disk kills performance) that it's usually cheaper to just buy more storage. It's also unlikely that we would ever migrate the /home NFS server to FreeBSD (at least in the near-term future), since it lacks the HA clustering and volume management that Solaris has. (This is an example of an area where Linux *does* have an advantage over FreeBSD.) It's *also* unlikely that we would ever put /home on ZFS, whatever OS we used. I don't mind ZFS for root, and I use it at home (on both FreeBSD and Solaris) without problems, but we've had some unfortunate issues with it at the TS that have made me a bit wary. This is true, and is something that came up the last time we discussed this internally. I'm not too worried about this; the login server environment doesn't really tax the OS, and I can't think of many (any?) problems we've had there that would require vendor support. There are places like iXsystems <http://www.ixsystems.com/bsdsupport> which offer third-party support for FreeBSD. I don't have any experience with that, or any idea how it compares price-wise. Not sure what economies we could gain here. The Toolserver is completely separate from Wikimedia's infrastructure (except that we use the same colo), and both of us prefer it that way. IOW, even if we used Linux, TS systems could not become just another Wikimedia server. SGE is dead on every platform, including Solaris. The replacement is either Oracle Grid Engine (which costs money), or one of the various forks of the open-source SGE (which should work on both FreeBSD and Solaris). We're still using SGE because I want to see which (if any) fork gains acceptable before switching. ZFS snapshots are nice, but OTOH ZFS can't remove storage from a pool or do any kind of online relayout, both of which are standard features in VxVM (and I assume in Linux LVM as well, although I have no experience of it.) In any case we don't store data on login servers. Linux has lxc and OpenVZ, which are both very similar to zones, as well as Xen or KVM for full virtualisation. Never really saw the point of that. If you want Linux, use Linux. (I guess at the moment it's the only way for Linux users to get a useful ZFS?) - river.