Hello, I think I know the answer to this, but not being an iSCSI expert I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised by your answers. I currently use ZFS plus NFS to host a shared VMFS store for my VMware ESX cluster. It''s easy to set up and high availability works great since all the ESX hosts see the same storage pool. However, NFS performance has been pretty poor and I am looking for other options. I do not currently use any SSD drives in my pool and I understand adding a couple as ZIL devices might improve performance. I am also thinking about switching to iSCSI. Here is my confusion/question. Is it possible to share the same ZFS file system with multiple ESX hosts via iSCSI? My belief is that an iSCSI connection is sort of like having a dedicated physical drive and therefore does not lend itself to sharing between multiple systems. Please set me straight. Thank you, Chris Dunbar
Yes, it requires a clustered filesystem to share out a single LUN to multiple hosts. Vmfs3, however bad of an implementation, is in fact a clustered filesystem. I highly doubt nfs is your problem though. I''d take nfs over iscsi and vmfs any day. On May 23, 2010 8:06 PM, "Chris Dunbar - Earthside, LLC" < cdunbar at earthside.net> wrote: Hello, I think I know the answer to this, but not being an iSCSI expert I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised by your answers. I currently use ZFS plus NFS to host a shared VMFS store for my VMware ESX cluster. It''s easy to set up and high availability works great since all the ESX hosts see the same storage pool. However, NFS performance has been pretty poor and I am looking for other options. I do not currently use any SSD drives in my pool and I understand adding a couple as ZIL devices might improve performance. I am also thinking about switching to iSCSI. Here is my confusion/question. Is it possible to share the same ZFS file system with multiple ESX hosts via iSCSI? My belief is that an iSCSI connection is sort of like having a dedicated physical drive and therefore does not lend itself to sharing between multiple systems. Please set me straight. Thank you, Chris Dunbar _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100523/9dae16ff/attachment.html>
On May 23, 2010, at 6:05 PM, Chris Dunbar - Earthside, LLC wrote:> Hello, > > I think I know the answer to this, but not being an iSCSI expert I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised by your answers. I currently use ZFS plus NFS to host a shared VMFS store for my VMware ESX cluster. It''s easy to set up and high availability works great since all the ESX hosts see the same storage pool. However, NFS performance has been pretty poor and I am looking for other options. I do not currently use any SSD drives in my pool and I understand adding a couple as ZIL devices might improve performance. I am also thinking about switching to iSCSI. Here is my confusion/question. Is it possible to share the same ZFS file system with multiple ESX hosts via iSCSI?Yes.> My belief is that an iSCSI connection is sort of like having a dedicated physical drive and therefore does not lend itself to sharing between multiple systems.No. That said, if a single iSCSI target is concurrently shared by two initiators, then the access needs to be controlled in some way, via a shared storage mechanism or reservations. -- richard -- Richard Elling richard at nexenta.com +1-760-896-4422 ZFS and NexentaStor training, Rotterdam, July 13-15, 2010 http://nexenta-rotterdam.eventbrite.com/