[geeks] BSD Questions

[Mike Meredith]

Good Evening Ladies and Gents[0]!

I'm contemplating getting one of those HP thingies, slapping FreeBSD on
it and using it to replace my ESXi hosted OpenSolaris server for a
whole bundle of reasons. 

Now whilst I'm not a complete idiot, and have run BSD and BSD-like
systems in the past, it has been a long time, so :-

How stable is FreeBSD 8 with ZFS[1] likely to be ? Not that I imagine
*BSD has grown any less stable over the years, but ZFS is a little new.

Given that FreeBSD-CURRENT has a later version of ZFS with features I'd
like, how stable is that likely to be ? I'm not looking for stable
enough to keep a bank happy, but neither do I want to come home several
times a week to find a kernel panic on the console.

Anything about the spec of that HP that screams "not for FreeBSD" ?

Slightly more technical now, given that BSD Jails basically require a
complete copy of the 'world' does it seem feasible to do that by
providing a Jail with a ZFS clone of the 'global jail' ?

And anything else that seems worth mentioning!

0: I'm feeling in a slightly whimsical mood tonight.

1: Yes I know it's not a simple install, but it's not that tricky even
   to someone as rusty as I am - I installed it yesterday. 

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 By the way, you DON'T want to see what a meat layer buffer overrun
 looks like.... (mjr on fw-wiz)