On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 5:47 AM, Mark Creamer <white...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi I wanted to get some expert advice on this. I have an ordinary hardware > SAN from Promise Tech that presents the LUNs via iSCSI. I would like to use > that if possible with my VMware environment where I run several Solaris / > OpenSolaris virtual machines. My question is regarding the virtual disks. > > 1. Should I create individual iSCSI LUNs and present those to the VMware > ESXi host as iSCSI storage, and then create virtual disks from there on each > Solaris VM? > > - or - > > 2. Should I (assuming this is possible), let the Solaris VM mount the iSCSI > LUNs directly (that is, NOT show them as VMware storage but let the VM > connect to the iSCSI across the network.) ? > > Part of the issue is I have no idea if having a hardware RAID 5 or 6 disk > set will create a problem if I then create a bunch of virtual disks and then > use ZFS to create RAIDZ for the VM to use. Seems like that might be asking > for trouble.
The ideal solution would be to present all disks directly as JBOD to solaris without any raid/virtualization (either from the storage of vmware). If you use (1), you'd pretty much given up data integrity check to the lower layer (SAN + ESXi). In this case you'd probably better off simply using stripe on zfs side (there's not much advantage of using raidz if the block device would reside on the same physical disk in the SAN anyway). If you use (2), you should have the option of exporting each raw disk on the SAN as a LUN to solaris, and you can create mirror/raidz from it. However this setup is more complicated (e.g. need to setup the SAN in a specific way, which it may or may not be capable of), plus there's a performance overhead from vmware virtual network. Personally I'd chose (1), and use zfs simply for it's snapshot/clone/compression capability, not for its data integrity check. -- Fajar _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
