On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 2:03 AM, besson3c <j...@netmusician.org> wrote:
> I'm entertaining something which might be a little wacky, I'm wondering > what your general reaction to this scheme might be :) > > > I would like to invest in some sort of storage appliance, and I like the > idea of something I can grow over time, something that isn't tethered to my > servers (i.e. not direct attach), as I'd like to keep this storage appliance > beyond the life of my servers. Therefore, a RAID 5 or higher type setup in a > separate 2U chassis is attractive to me. > > I do a lot of virtualization on my servers, and currently my VM host is > running VMWare Server. It seems like the way forward is with software based > RAID with sophisticated file systems such as ZFS or BTRFS rather than a > hardware RAID card and "dumber" file system. I really like what ZFS brings > to the table in terms of RAID-Z and more, so I'm thinking that it might be > smart to skip getting a hardware RAID card and jump into using ZFS. > > The obvious problem at this point is that ZFS is not available for Linux > yet, and BTRFS is not yet ready for production usage. So, I'm exploring some > options. One option is to just get that RAID card and reassess all of this > when BTRFS is ready, but the other option is the following... > > What if I were to run a FreeBSD VM and present it several vdisks, format > these as ZFS, and serve up ZFS shares through this VM? I realize that I'm > getting the sort of userland conveniences of ZFS this way since the host > would still be writing to an EXT3/4 volume, but on the other hand perhaps > these conveniences and other benefits would be worthwhile? What would I be > missing out on, despite no assurances of the same integrity given the > underlying EXT3/4 volume? > > What do you think, would setting up a VM solely for hosting ZFS shares be > worth my while as a sort of bridge to BTRFS? I realize that I'd have to > allocate a lot of RAM to this VM, I'm prepared to do that. > > > Is this idea retarded? Something you would recommend or do yourself? All of > this convenience is pointless if there will be significant problems, I would > like to eventually serve production servers this way. Fairly low volume > ones, but still important to me. > > Why not just convert the VM's to run in virtualbox and run Solaris directly on the hardware? --Tim
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