Since no one replies, I'll put some of my thoughts. I don't use Xen but I use VMware ESX, so the idea should be similar.
1. I usually create one virtual disk for OS, data on another virtual disk or san/nfs. Alignment for OS doesn't matter too much, but for data,it does. I use 64k alignment for data disk, but as long as it's multiplier of 32k it should be ok. 2. You can add more disks to zpool later. 3. You can use multipathing or nic teaming. No idea about IB with comstar, I use 4Gb FC (qlogic), works extremely well. 4. No idea about status of dedup. However, dedup takes a lot of system resources so you SAN server needs to be very powerful. I have it on our netapp and datadomain in production. Depending on your data, we see quite big gain in space. With ZFS, you can turn on compression. However, dedup makes it very hard to predict space usage. When we backup deduped volumes, data has to be de-deduped and transfer to backup server. In one datastore, we see volume usage about 150G but during backup, it transfers over 700G data. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
