I've been tasked to suggest a NAS replacement for our aging fileserver at work, its currently running Linux with XFS (using LVM).
We're a very small company of 5 folks, so we're using commodity hardware (2GhzCore2, 8GbRAM and about 4TB worth of HDDs for the new build).
I was looking into OpenSolaris (I come from a Debian/RHEL background) and love what I see of ZFS, but I want to install a headless bare-essential version of OpenSolaris. This means no X, Gnome or any of the gui applications, but I'm not able to find a way of doing it.
Essentially we use this 'all-in-one' box for the following:
- NAS/FileServer, about 2TB right now, used by all our Win32 hosts (lots of large PSD/Premier files!)
- Subversion for hosting our source files
- VMWare Server (right now 1.0) to use as a deployment for Windows 2003 and other OSs.
Another box is our gateway (OpenBSD) that tackles DHCP etc, I just need this box to host our content, run our Continuous integration (TeamCity, Confluence and Jira) inside a few VMs (seperate Glassfish installs) and also run Windows 2003 instancese for SQL Server.
Do you think its possible for me to install a cut down version of OpenSolaris (not Nextena) and use it for its ZFS love and setup Xen to use as a virtualisation manager for our virtual needs?
I realise 8Gb RAM may not be enough, it will be bumped up to 16 soon. I'm just a bit lost into wondering why we have to have Gnome for OpenSolaris installs :(