On 2013-06-24 17:16, Gabriele Bulfon wrote:
At first, I was thinking to ask the VMware guys to let me have some of the SAS disks assigned directly to my storage virtual machine, so to handle them via zfs without VMware overhead. But becuase they want to manage VMware backups, they prefer me to use VMware vmdk files.
There are a number of write-ups about "all-in-one" solutions with VMWare and illumos-based OSes, where the illumos-based storage VM indeed "owns" the HBA and disks, uses them efficiently with ZFS, and publishes over iSCSI or NFS to VMWare so it stores other VMs in its VMDKs. The storage VM must be configured to start first and stop last, of course, but otherwise these setups are deemed to be quite convenient. I haven't used them myself yet, though looked a lot at descriptions such as this: http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/all-in-one.pdf http://www.napp-it.org/napp-it/all-in-one/index_en.html (the author had some better-formatted pages in the past, with nice diagrams and all, and if he is still on these lists - might point to them, perhaps) I suggest that you skim over such posts and offer them to your VMWare guys - maybe they would be convinced that it suits them better as well :) Quite possibly, if the virtual storage protocols are sometime integrated, their VMWare hosts would be able to spawn cloned VMs using ZFS clones and zero overheads - nifty ;) HTH, //Jim Klimov ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
