On 25/06/2013 1:16 AM, Gabriele Bulfon 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? > - how big should be vmdk at maximum to be safe?
Until ESXi 5.5 is released, you're limited to 2TB per VMDK file. Including RDM. After that, 62TB. For me, the main advantage I can see with RDM is if you can get the raw disk exposed then ZFS sees the errors and not ESXi. I think this also lets ZFS schedule the I/O better. So from t hat perspective, the size is dictated for you by physical hardware and ESXi. Similar with passing the HBA through but that has different support requirements of the hardware. Darren ------------------------------------------- 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
