whats the best way to acquaint ones self with ZFS? What Operating System / Virtualized hardware in terms of disks would I use? solaris :/ nah it doesn't really matter there's nothing particularly complicated about it i reckon openindiana, linux, freebsd are all fine choices. i would stay away from solaris now though recent solaris and recent free stuff isn't compatible, and oracle have kind of made a mess of it. for disks, if running on real hw, then 3 hard-disks + 1 ssd is probably a nice place to start. but you can run it on even just a single hard-disk and still get snapshotting and other useful features. how about multiple virtual disks residing on a single ssd? For getting the hang of it, sure that's fine Doing production-level stuff... no :p But if you're just getting the hang of the commands, then pick Linux (eg Arch), FreeBSD, or some Solaris derivitave that you're most comfortable with. brycec: definitely not production stuff does any operating system provide a decent gui for beginners to get started with zfs? FreeNAS Or is it command line based for the most part? k It's commandline mostly. But FreeNAS is nice and gooey. ^It=ZFS how does the built in iscsi and samba support vary between FreeBSD and Linux? Linux doesn't have any. And FreeBSD doesn't really either. (But the built-in NFS support is there in FreeBSD) Specifically, it just ties-in to mountd, providing a few more exports(5) entires *entries solaris has the best built in samba other than windows linux, bsd, and os x are all pretty weak oh in solaris samba is built into zfs with linux it just interfaces to samba i wonder when samba will get smp support smp is multi processor support? yeh freenode is being special i see netsplit again? looks that way I have joins and parts hidden so I cant really tell any kvr hosts left to be updated ?