[zfs-discuss] ZFS: First use recommendations

Malachi de Ælfweald
Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:19:34 -0000

Currently, you can mirror your boot but not raidz2 it. I''d recommend
using 2
of the drives for a mirrored boot and the other 6 drives for raidz2.  I used
2x Addonics AE5RCS35NSA to hold the drives to give me hot swappability.

Out of curiousity, is there any reason you are going with vmware rather than
xVM with the HVM hosts?  I am in the process of setting up xVM on my
machine, and would be interested to hear your thoughts.

I had originally planned on using iSCSI and NAS to provide the space... I
haven''t decided yet whether I will do that.  But I do plan on using zfs
snapshots/clones with the xVM hosts.

Malachi

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 5:19 AM, gm_sjo <saqmaster at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
>
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