Really if your just talking a handful of drives then hardware raid may be the simpilest solution for now. However, I also would be inclided to use seperate nas and vm servers. Even with ecc you can put together a nas box for a few hundred (or use existing hardware), plus what you need for a case, bays and drives. Which is what you'll spend on decent hardware raid.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with SprintSpeed -----Original Message----- From: Joe Auty <j...@netmusician.org> Date: Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:50:30 To: <j...@lentecs.com> Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] RAID-Z and virtualization j...@lentecs.com wrote: > 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. > I'm reluctant to go ESX or ESXi due to cost related issues, and what I can get out of the free versions. The other monkey wrench, as I just wrote in another post, is that I run several 64 bit FreeBSD guests which don't support Xen. > ------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. > -- Joe Auty NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians http://www.netmusician.org j...@netmusician.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
