I'm likely to be building a ZFS server to act as NFS shared storage for a couple of VMware ESX servers. Does anybody have experience of using ZFS with VMware like this, and can anybody confirm the best zpool configuration?
The server will have 16x 500GB SATA drives, with dual Opteron CPU's and 8GB of RAM. Dual parity is a must, as are hot spares. My first thoughts were to use raid-z2, with 2 hot spares and a zpool made up of two 7 drive raid-z2 volumes, giving me 5TB of storage. However, I'm pretty sure VMware likes good random read performance, so I'm considering one hot spare and a zpool made up of 5x three disk mirror volumes. It's only 2.5TB of storage, but that should be plenty, and I'd rather have good performance. Can anybody confirm that random read performance is definately better with mirrored volumes. Does ZFS use all the disks in the mirror sets independantly when reading data? Am I right in thinking I could have around 7x better random read performance with the 15 mirrored drives, when compared to the two raid-z2 volumes? thanks, Ross This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
