I've been looking to build my own cheap SAN to explore HA scenarios with VMware hosts, though not for a production environment. I'm new to opensolaris but I am familiar with other clustered HA systems. The features of ZFS seem like they would fit right in with attempting to build an HA storage platform for VMware hosts on inexpensive hardware.
Here is what I am thinking. I want to have at least two clustered nodes (may be virtual running off the local storage of the VMware host) that act as the front end of the SAN. These will not have any real storage themselves, but will be initiators for backend computers with the actual disks in them. I want to be able to add and remove/replace at will so I figure the backends will just be fairly dumb iSCSI targets that just present each disk. That way the front ends are close to the hardware for zfs to work best but would not limit a raid set to the capacity of a single enclosure. I'd like to present a RAIDZ2 array as a block device to VMware, how would that work? Could that then be clustered so the iSCSI target is HA? Am I completely off base or is there an easier way? My goal is to be able to kill any one box (or multiple) and still keep the storage available for VMware, but still get a better total storage to usable ratio than just a plain mirror (2:1). I also want to be able to add and remove storage dynamically. You know, champagne on a beer budget. :) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
