On Aug 21, 2010, at 10:14 AM, Ross Walker wrote: > I'm planning on setting up an NFS server for our ESXi hosts and plan on using > a virtualized Solaris or Nexenta host to serve ZFS over NFS.
Please follow the joint EMC+NetApp best practices for VMware ESX servers. The recommendations apply to any NFS implementation for ESX. > The storage I have available is provided by Equallogic boxes over 10Gbe iSCSI. > > I am trying to figure out the best way to provide both performance and > resiliency given the Equallogic provides the redundancy. > > Since I am hoping to provide a 2TB datastore I am thinking of carving out > either 3 1TB luns or 6 500GB luns that will be RDM'd to the storage VM and > within the storage server setting up either 1 raidz vdev with the 1TB luns > (less RDMs) or 2 raidz vdevs with the 500GB luns (more fine grained > expandability, work in 1TB increments). > > Given the 2GB of write-back cache on the Equallogic I think the integrated > ZIL would work fine (needs benchmarking though). This should work fine. > The vmdk files themselves won't be backed up (more data then I can store), > just the essential data contained within, so I would think resiliency would > be important here. > > My questions are these. > > Does this setup make sense? Yes, it is perfectly reasonable. > Would I be better off forgoing resiliency for simplicity, putting all my > faith into the Equallogic to handle data resiliency? I don't have much direct experience with Equillogic, but I would expect that they do a reasonable job of protecting data, or they would be out of business. You can also use the copies parameter to set extra redundancy for the important files. ZFS will also tell you if corruption is found in a single file, so that you can recover just the file and not be forced to recover everything else. I think this fits into your back strategy. > Will this setup perform? Anybody with experience in this type of setup? Many people are quite happy with RAID arrays and still take advantage of the features of ZFS: checksums, snapshots, clones, send/receive, VMware integration, etc. The decision of where to implement data protection (RAID) is not as important as the decision to protect your data. My advice: protect your data. -- richard -- Richard Elling rich...@nexenta.com +1-760-896-4422 Enterprise class storage for everyone www.nexenta.com _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
