In the interests of avoiding FCvsNFS religious wars, let me first say that I prefer NFS over a standard FC SAN, and also I don't really have the option of using using FC for this anyhow.
I'm interested in setting up a couple of ESXi servers. I've got a couple servers that each have 8gb of ram and 2 opteron CPUs. None of them have FC but they all have GB ethernet and I happen to have a couple of gb switches as well...
The server hardware is a single QLogic HBA and a single SATA<->FC 4tb array, and a motherboard with a pair of opteron 246 CPUs and 8gb of ram.
What is the best choice for an platform for using this hardware as an NFS server?
I figure my options are linux (openfiler and XFS), solaris (and ZFS) or freebsd (and ZFS).
I'm really interested in playing around with ZFS and I figure it has cool features. I'm pretty experienced with solaris 9, and older (and mostly on SPARC hardware) but have quite a bit less experience with solaris 10 and as far as I can tell, solaris 10 is pretty different. I also have lots of experience with freebsd, but am wary of ZFS on freebsd.
Any suggestions? This is a free-time sort of thing so I don't have huge amounts of time to go down lots of blind alleys only to discover that this or that isn't supported or randomly explodes after it's been busy for a week.