At first I just wanted to see how much work it would take to port ZFS to FreeBSD. I started by making it compile on FreeBSD, and once I did that, I was quite sure it would take at least six months to have the first prototype working. The funny thing was that after another week or so, ZFS was running on my test machine
Also, note that ZFS spawns a lot of threads for concurrent IO. So, enable NCQ (check queue length in /sys/block/<drive>/queue/nr_requests) on the drives if it is not set already. Invest into some SSD drive(s) as the L2 cache, which will speed up random IO ops tremendously.
ZFS Learning Center Get familiar with the world's most advanced file system—Solaris ZFS—with easy access to multimedia presentations and demos at the ZFS Learning Center.
Is it a bug or a feature that the solaris iscsi initiator isn't able to connect to an iscsi target on the same machine, using either the 127.0.0.1 localhost address or the machine's own ip address?
During the last couple of weeks I worked with a customer who bought a Sun Fire X4500 server (you know, Thumper). The plan is to run Solaris ZFS on it, then provide big iSCSI volumes to the video editing systems, which tend to be specialized Windows or Mac OS X machines. Wonderful idea: Just use zpool create to combine a number of disks with some RAID level into a pool, then zfs create -V to create a ZVOL. Thanks to zfs shareiscsi=on, sharing the volume over iSCSI is dead easy.