zfs discuss - Feb 2006 - zfs and vmware

I''m planning to build a new server for my home network and was thinking
of running vmware server on it. I would then have one virtual machine with
Solaris and one or two other virtual machines with other systems on them. The
Solaris machine would be used for storage using zfs.

My question now is if anyone has tried to dedicate physical disks in vmware to a
solaris guest and then used those as a storage pool?
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Not that many ansvers... but hey I have now done some testing myself. 

I Installed a minimal Debian with vmware server on one machine with the
operating system on a couple of mirrored sata drives. I then created a virtual
machine and installed the latest Solaris Express Comunity Edition. Then I added
two physical discs to the virtual machine (/dev/hda and /dev/hdb). There was no
problem in creating a storage pool with those discs and later when rebooting the
machine I had the same trouble as others have reported. That is my machine
refused to boot when it found EFI labels on the drives. Had to disable the
drives in BIOS for the machine to boot again.

I''m not sure how safe this setup is so before I choose to use it or not
I would like to test it some more. Are there any good tools for Solaris to maybe
"stress test" test strorage pool?
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Stefan Johansson wrote:
> Not that many ansvers... but hey I have now done some testing myself. 
> 
> I Installed a minimal Debian with vmware server on one machine with the
operating system on a couple of mirrored sata drives. I then created a virtual
machine and installed the latest Solaris Express Comunity Edition. Then I added
two physical discs to the virtual machine (/dev/hda and /dev/hdb). There was no
problem in creating a storage pool with those discs and later when rebooting the
machine I had the same trouble as others have reported. That is my machine
refused to boot when it found EFI labels on the drives. Had to disable the
drives in BIOS for the machine to boot again.
> 
> I''m not sure how safe this setup is so before I choose to use it
or not I would like to test it some more. Are there any good tools for Solaris
to maybe "stress test" test strorage pool?
We plan on releasing some file system stress tests later this year.
In the meantime, some of the performance benchmarks do a nice job
of stressing file systems.

See:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/performance/

Cheers,
Jim
> This message posted from opensolaris.org
> _______________________________________________
> zfs-discuss mailing list
> zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss