[zfs-discuss] ZFS: First use recommendations

gm_sjo
Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:19:15 -0000

Hi all,


I''m about to embark on my first voyage into ZFS (and Solaris, frankly)
as it
seems very appealing for a low-cost SAN/NAS solution. I am in the process of
building up a HCL-compliant whitebox server which ultimately will contain
8x1TB SATA disks.

I would appreciate some advice and recommendations based on my requirements,
which are :-

- Right now I don''t seen any reason to not simply dump all 8 disks into
a
single raidz (or raidz2) pool - anything I may have missed here?

- To provide a slice of storage (~1TB) to a vmware host for vmdk''s
(i''m
considering iSCSI)

- To provide a large slice of storage (~4TB) to a Windows 2003/8 file server
guest on the vmware host, to be accessed by Windows clients over CIFS.


Right i''m now what''s in my head is using an iSCSI slice for
the VMDK''s (so
vmware can manage the storage) and NFS for the file server storage. I''m
intruged in your thoughts on this.


Also, some other questions :-

- My vmware host is only going to by ESXi, so I don''t win any fancy
backup
functionality. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could backup vmware
guests, without using guest-client software (eg, backupexec)? Can I use ZFS
snapshots or clones to do this on a live, running vmware guest?

- I''ve heard that NFS is faster than iSCSI with regards to presenting
storage to vmware - is this true?


And one last OT thing; i''m a reasonably experienced bsd/linux
administrator
but am totally new to Solaris - for the simple (hopefully) task of building
and maintaining a SAN, do you think advanced Solaris administration skills
will be beneficial and worthwhile?


Many thanks in advance.
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