> From: Saxon, Will [mailto:will.sa...@sage.com] > > What I am wondering is whether this is really worth it. Are you planning to > share the storage out to other VM hosts, or are all the VMs running on the > host using the 'local' storage? I know we like ZFS vs. traditional RAID and > volume management, and I get that being able to boot any ZFS-capable OS is > good for disaster recovery, but what I don't get is how this ends up working > better than a larger dedicated ZFS system and a storage network. Is it > cheaper over several hosts? Are you getting better performance through > e.g. the vmxnet3 adapter and NFS than you would just using the disks > directly?
I also don't know enough details of how this works out. In particular: If your goal is high performance storage, snapshots, backups, and data integrity for Linux or some other OS (AKA, ZFS on Linux or Windows) then you should be able to win with this method of Linux & ZFS server both in VM's of a single physical server, utilizing a vmnet switch and either NFS or iSCSI or CIFS. But until some benchmarks are done, to show that vmware isn't adding undue overhead, I must consider it still "unproven." As compared to one big ZFS server being used as the backend SAN for a bunch of vmware hosts... If your goal is high performance for distributed computing, then you always need to use local disk attached independently to each of the compute nodes. There's simply no way you can scale any central server large enough to handle a bunch of hosts without any performance loss. Assuming the ZFS server is able to max out its local disks... If there exists a bus which is fast enough for a remote server to max out those disks... Then the remote server should have the storage attached locally, because the physical disks are the performance bottleneck. If your goal is just "use ZFS datastore for all your vmware hosts," ... AKA you're mostly interested in checksumming and snapshots, you're not terribly concerned with performance as long as it's "fast enough," then most likely you'll be fine with using 1Gb ether because it's so cheap. Maybe you upgrade to a faster or different type of bus (fc or ib). _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
