>From your description, it sounds like you are looking for an independent nas >hardware box? In which case using freenas or opensolaris to handle the >hardware and present iscsi volumes to your vms, is a pretty simple solution.
If your instead looking for one box to handle both data storage and vms, then I would suggest looking into vmware esxi. A vm hosted on esxi can be given full control of certain hardware, which isn't possible on vmware server. Alternatively you could set up an opensolaris dom0 using xVM (Xen), and have the dom0 handle the drives. But this would require more complicated conversion of existing vms, or rebuilding. Or do the same thing with freebsd as your base system. ------Original Message------ From: besson3c Sender: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org To: zfs Discuss Subject: [zfs-discuss] RAID-Z and virtualization Sent: Nov 8, 2009 3:03 AM I'm entertaining something which might be a little wacky, I'm wondering what your general reaction to this scheme might be :) I would like to invest in some sort of storage appliance, and I like the idea of something I can grow over time, something that isn't tethered to my servers (i.e. not direct attach), as I'd like to keep this storage appliance beyond the life of my servers. Therefore, a RAID 5 or higher type setup in a separate 2U chassis is attractive to me. I do a lot of virtualization on my servers, and currently my VM host is running VMWare Server. It seems like the way forward is with software based RAID with sophisticated file systems such as ZFS or BTRFS rather than a hardware RAID card and "dumber" file system. I really like what ZFS brings to the table in terms of RAID-Z and more, so I'm thinking that it might be smart to skip getting a hardware RAID card and jump into using ZFS. The obvious problem at this point is that ZFS is not available for Linux yet, and BTRFS is not yet ready for production usage. So, I'm exploring some options. One option is to just get that RAID card and reassess all of this when BTRFS is ready, but the other option is the following... What if I were to run a FreeBSD VM and present it several vdisks, format these as ZFS, and serve up ZFS shares through this VM? I realize that I'm getting the sort of userland conveniences of ZFS this way since the host would still be writing to an EXT3/4 volume, but on the other hand perhaps these conveniences and other benefits would be worthwhile? What would I be missing out on, despite no assurances of the same integrity given the underlying EXT3/4 volume? What do you think, would setting up a VM solely for hosting ZFS shares be worth my while as a sort of bridge to BTRFS? I realize that I'd have to allocate a lot of RAM to this VM, I'm prepared to do that. Is this idea retarded? Something you would recommend or do yourself? All of this convenience is pointless if there will be significant problems, I would like to eventually serve production servers this way. Fairly low volume ones, but still important to me. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with SprintSpeed _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
