Hi all,
I'm about to embark on my first voyage into ZFS (and Solaris, frankly) as it seems very appealing for a low-cost SAN/NAS solution. I am in the process of building up a HCL-compliant whitebox server which ultimately will contain 8x1TB SATA disks. I would appreciate some advice and recommendations based on my requirements, which are :- - Right now I don't seen any reason to not simply dump all 8 disks into a single raidz (or raidz2) pool - anything I may have missed here? - To provide a slice of storage (~1TB) to a vmware host for vmdk's (i'm considering iSCSI) - To provide a large slice of storage (~4TB) to a Windows 2003/8 file server guest on the vmware host, to be accessed by Windows clients over CIFS. Right i'm now what's in my head is using an iSCSI slice for the VMDK's (so vmware can manage the storage) and NFS for the file server storage. I'm intruged in your thoughts on this. Also, some other questions :- - My vmware host is only going to by ESXi, so I don't win any fancy backup functionality. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could backup vmware guests, without using guest-client software (eg, backupexec)? Can I use ZFS snapshots or clones to do this on a live, running vmware guest? - I've heard that NFS is faster than iSCSI with regards to presenting storage to vmware - is this true? And one last OT thing; i'm a reasonably experienced bsd/linux administrator but am totally new to Solaris - for the simple (hopefully) task of building and maintaining a SAN, do you think advanced Solaris administration skills will be beneficial and worthwhile? Many thanks in advance.
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