I have been doing this on Intel for a few years now. I use NFS not iSCSI. We have one iSCSI client, its a win2k3 server and it looses connection all the time to the target. I think its that machines nic at this time.
The Seagate drives probably will not buy you much. The PCI SSD might not be recognized by Solaris. And if you want fast.. do not use RAIDZ (how many VM's do you want?). Your IOPS drop to the speed of one drive (or so I am told). We use gigE, but just Jumbo Frames and we can get a full GigE, but the 10Gbe stuff arrived Friday (yeah). Ditch the RAID controller, it will get in your way. I use a LSI 9200-8e and it works fantastic. As for cache, we use Intel SSD's as part of the pool. We also have SSD's for ZIL, which helps tremendously. My servers, boot off of cheap SATA ZFS root mirror and we also have 48GB or more of RAM in each host. 12GB will be OK until you do a ZPOOL SCRUB, then you will have to tell your users to not work for a few hours. So if you need to replace a broken drive.. its when nobody is working. Do yourself a favor.. Get more RAM, as much as you can afford. Use Velociraptors instead of the Momentus. If you only have 8 bays and have say 10 VM's Do a 6 drive Velociraptor Mirror, if you cannot afford that, the Momentus might have some benefit, but a Hitachi 7K500 would be cheaper still. To make 6 bays the fastest 6 bays can be, do 4 HDD's RAID'z, 1 SSD L2ARC, 1 SSD (SLC) ZIL. Your writes will be limited to the speed of one drive, but your reads will be through the roof. The ZIL will really help on the writes. Oh yeah, get more RAM. We had to buy an external drive shelf to hold enough disks to make things work right. I still ended up going straight SSD's for most of our stuff. Other forum posters told me I was crazy. We have both SSD's in RAIDZ and Mirrored. Guess which one is faster. Did I mention that you should get more RAM. My current puzzle is to see if I mirror whole ZPOOLs of how many random write IOPS I can get. 3 mirrored ZPOOLs mirrored. Could be fast! In all .. it depends on how many VM's you have/want. I have over a hundred at the moment and I am still not happy. I prefer NFS because I don't have to carve out disk space like ISCSI does. It might be slower, but not that much slower. 7200 sata drives push 80 IOPS. 10K push 130. An exchange server will want 50 give or take, SQL server more during a query. Domain controller wants 10. RAIDz is 1 drive worth of IOPS at write. 6 drive mirror is 3 drives worth IOPS at write. Did I mention get alot of RAM? Does that help you, sorry for it being a bit long. Derek -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list storage-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
