Tim Cook wrote: > On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 2:03 AM, besson3c <j...@netmusician.org > <mailto:j...@netmusician.org>> wrote: > > 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. > > > Why not just convert the VM's to run in virtualbox and run Solaris > directly on the hardware? >
That's another possibility, but it depends on how Virtualbox stacks up against VMWare Server. At this point a lot of planning would be necessary to switch to something else, although this is possibility. How would Virtualbox stack up against VMWare Server? Last I checked it doesn't have a remote console of any sort, which would be a deal breaker. Can I disable allocating virtual memory to Virtualbox VMs? Can I get my VMs to auto boot in a specific order at runlevel 3? Can I control my VMs via the command line? I thought Virtualbox was GUI only, designed for Desktop use primarily? This switch will only make sense if all of this points to a net positive. > --Tim -- Joe Auty NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians http://www.netmusician.org j...@netmusician.org
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