Hey OBasel!
FreeNAS 0.8 and ZFSguru both are still in development. ZFSguru is beginning to be in a usable state, but lacks core features, especially compared to the older FreeNAS 0.7.x releases.
I'm not very familiar with all the Solaris-based derivatives like Nexenta, but i can tell you about BSD variants:
FreeNAS 0.7.x
Stable NAS release with alot of features and widely tested.
FreeNAS 0.8
Complete rewrite and still in development, still lacks many features compared to original FreeNAS project.
ZFSguru 0.1.7
New project not related but similar to FreeNAS; advantages lie in features, performance and user-friendly operation.
Compared to FreeNAS, ZFSguru has some advantages:
- more user friendly web-interface
- ZFS-only system means your RAM will be more efficiently used than with UFS + ZFS systems
- easily upgrade the FreeBSD system to new versions via web-interface
- powerful benchmark that produces graphic images of ZFS performance under varying pool configurations
- uses vanilla FreeBSD releases; making it easy to extend ZFSguru with other software; it would still be a native official FreeBSD install with nothing stripped away
If you're looking for a sleek NAS operating system for your next ZFS build, ZFSguru could be a candidate. But if you need a working solution now, the older FreeNAS 0.7.x releases may be more appropriate.
However, you can use
Virtualbox to test each solution in a virtual environment with virtual disks and at least 1GB of memory assigned to it. The ZFSguru LiveCD can be downloaded
here. You don't need to burn the .iso file to cd if you just want to test it using Virtualbox.
Cheers!