On Nov 12, 2010, at 10:20 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > For the moment, the systems that I have my sights directly set on, are for > academia. In my basement. So $1,000 out of my pocket is very real to me. > I am running (free) ESXi, and I am using workstation-class hardware. No > server-grade rackmount systems yet.
For systems that you're running in your basement, I can see that a thousand dollars makes a real difference to your budget. However, in that case, I also wonder what you could be doing where standard Gigabit Ethernet would not provide sufficient bandwidth. Assuming that for your home system you still want/need higher bandwidth than Gigabit Ethernet can provide, and you need a less expensive solution than what you can find with 10GigE, I think that an alternative approach to interface bonding could work. I know that if you have multiple Gigabit Ethernet interfaces in a standard Linux or *nix box, you can run OSPF-enabled routing tools on the hosts to load-balance at the IP layer (instead of at the Ethernet layer), and have your applications use service IP addresses that are bound to the loopback interface, and then advertise routing to those service addresses across each of the available network interfaces. That is a standard host-level load-balancing trick that they use at ISC for f.root-servers.net, and they even have a white paper on how to do that sort of thing. However, I don't know if this host-level IP-based load-balancing will work with ZFS or ESXi. > With repetition, it becomes worth while to explore the options and try to > find something cheaper and more effective than the 10Ge. I mean ... 6Gbit > sata controllers are $30. That assumes that you have SATA interfaces on both ends that allow their respective machines to serve as either host or target, as appropriate. I don't know that much about the SATA protocol standards, but that's not a basic assumption that I would make without a lot more investigation. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
