Op 7-6-2010 22:55, Collins, Kevin L. schreef:
> I'm contemplating the above combination for use as a NAS unit to be used
> by (among other things) vmWare ESXi 4.0. I know there are
> newer/faster/better things available, but these are the components I
> have on hand to build the unit.
Not quite the same, but I'm very happy with the 1950 with a SAS card for
the head unit, A Infortrend A24S sata disk cabinet for the volume and
NexentaStor for the NAS software.
To my surprise, as a early adopter of the NexentaStor Software since the
early 1.0 days it's been a rather uneventful and pleasant experience.
I've tried OpenFiler, Open-E in various versions and building something
myself.
None of those worked as well out of the box as the NexentaStor software.
It's OpenSolaris with the ZFS filesystem and it does NAS, NFS, iSCSI and
a number of other minor protocols.
I use it to back our ESX 4.0 store with NFS with 10Gbit networking and
it's not dropped a beat since we started a few years ago.
It has snapshots, journalling, log device support to speed up write
latency and a L2 read cache to speed up reads.
The log device in our case is a 2nd LD on the onboard PERC of the 1950.
It sees only writes, and it seems that the 256MB cache is absorbing all
the log writes. Which makes it very fast.
We are adding a Intel MLC ssd soon for the L2ARC cache which will absorb
a lot of read requests to often sought pieces of disk. Like say a SQL
server VM.
You should consider trialling it to see what it has, it also has neat
plugins that integrate very well into ESX for deploying and cloning
virtual machines.
Note that we are currently still using 2.2.0 in production at work. 3.0
is available on request, but i'll wait for now.
Regards,
Seth
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