On Jun 24, 2013, at 8:16 AM, Gabriele Bulfon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi, > > I have a situation where I can't decide on the infrastructure, and because of > low profile budget > they can't affort buying a specialized hardware for the zfs storage, so > they're just moving > everything into a single VMWare ESX machine, which will hold some Windows > servers and some > XStream Server virtualized. > To let them have also XStream Storage, we decided to virtualize it too inside > VMWare, in case > they will be able to invest on new hardware later, allowing an easy migration > to the new hardware. > > 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. > > My questions are: > - is this a viable solution or should I consider any possible problem? It works. There are some slight performance impacts, but many people run systems this way. > - how big should be vmdk at maximum to be safe? I'm not sure if there is a small limit to the size of a vmdk, but ZFS can handle very large devices. > - should I consider having smaller vmdk files inside a single pool in stripe > mode? In general, no. If there are multiple physical and isolated datastores, then striping can improve bandwidth. > - should I consider having these vmdk files in raid-z mode, considering that > the hardware already > implements hardware raid? I wouldn't use raidz over vmdks -- richard > (adopting raidz could be a problem for the backup software that would see > much more differences than data itself) > > Any suggestion would be appreciated. > > Gabriele. > > illumos-discuss | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- 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
