You are completely off your rocker :) No, just kidding. Assuming the virtual front-end servers are running on different hosts, and you are doing some sort of raid, you should be fine. Performance may be poor due to the inexpensive targets on the back end, but you probably know that. A while back I thought of doing similar stuff using local storage on my ESX hosts, and abstracting that with an OpenSolaris VM and iSCSI/NFS.
Perhaps consider inexpensive but decent NAS/SAN devices from Synology. They are not expensive, offer NFS and iSCSI, and you can also replicate/backup between two of them using rsync. Yes, you would be 'wasting' the storage space by having two, but like I said, they are inexpensive. Then you would not have the two layer architecture. I just tested a two disk model, using ESXi 3.5u4 and a Windows VM. I used iometer, realworld test, and IOs were about what you would expect from mirrored 7200 SATA drives - 138 IOPS, about 1.1 Mbps. The internal CPU was around 20%, RAM usage was 128MB out of the 512MB on board, so it was disk limited. The Dell 2950 that I have 2009.06 installed on (16GB of RAM and an LSI HBA with an external SAS enclosure) with a single mirror using two 7200 drives gave me about 200 IOPS using the same test, presumably because of the large amounts of RAM for the L2ARC cache. -Scott -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
