Currently, you can mirror your boot but not raidz2 it. I'd recommend using 2 of the drives for a mirrored boot and the other 6 drives for raidz2. I used 2x Addonics AE5RCS35NSA to hold the drives to give me hot swappability.
Out of curiousity, is there any reason you are going with vmware rather than xVM with the HVM hosts? I am in the process of setting up xVM on my machine, and would be interested to hear your thoughts. I had originally planned on using iSCSI and NAS to provide the space... I haven't decided yet whether I will do that. But I do plan on using zfs snapshots/clones with the xVM hosts. Malachi On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 5:19 AM, gm_sjo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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. > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss > >
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