I can tell you now that OpenSolaris, ZFS & iSCSI is a piece of cake to use and work with. I haven't tested iSCSI with ESX for 9 months or so (I'm looking at NFS myself now for ESX), but I seem to remember it worked pretty well and I can certainly have another go when I get back to work later next week.
It really is a piece of cake to create iscsi shares with ZFS though, you create a new volume and just set shareiscsi to on. This is an example taken from the forums in November 2006! # zfs create -V 100M pool/volumes/v1 # zfs set shareiscsi=on pool/volumes/v1 # iscsitadm list target Target: pool/volumes/v1 iSCSI Name: iqn.1986-03.com.sun:02:4db92521-f5dc-cde4-9cd5-a3f6f567220a Connections: 0 Note that this isn't a standard ZFS filesystem, you have to use the -V option to give you a raw volume to work with. However, that said, iSCSI is a pain to work with in ESX, the names are horrible. I'm finding that I can get similar performance with NFS, and it's a lot easier to just point ESX to a named NFS mount point. You also have the benefit that you can see all your ESX files from Solaris, so backups are a lot easier. If nothing else it's worth doing just so you can use ZFS snapshots to take backups of your virtual machines. Disk controllers are a bit of an issue at the moment, you want to be reading through the ZFS forum to see what's written there. A full blown raid card running in pass through mode would probably be my recommendation for the controller (since they're designed to handle hardware failures and plain SATA controllers may not be). There's a very good point been raised that ZFS guarantees data integrity, data availability is still dependent on your hardware and drivers. Areca are Solaris certified and seem to have a very good reputation. A raid card also has the advantage that you could mirror a couple of devices and use that as your slog device. It does loose a bit of capacity, but gives you the benefits of ZFS doing the parity checks for the main pool, while still giving you the speed boost from the raid controllers cache. That will probably become academic by Christmas when Sun release their flash hardware to use as slog devices, but I think it's your best bet right now, especially if you want to get close to your DAS performance since VMware tends to be heavy on the random IO. Ross -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
