It is hard, as you note, to recommend a box without knowing the load. How many linux boxes are you talking about?
I think having a lot of space for your L2ARC is a great idea. Will you mirror your SLOG, or load balance them? I ask because perhaps one will be enough, IO wise. My box has one SLOG (X25-E) and can support about 2600 IOPS using an iometer profile that closely approximates my work load. My ~100 VMs on 8 ESX boxes average around 1000 IOPS, but can peak 2-3x that during backups. Don't discount NFS. I absolutely love NFS for management and thin provisioning reasons. Much easier (to me) than managing iSCSI, and performance is similar. I highly recommend load testing both iSCSI and NFS before you go live. Crash consistent backups of your VMs are possible using NFS, and recovering a VM from a snapshot is a little easier using NFS, I find. Why not larger capacity disks? Hopefully your switches support NIC aggregation? The only issue I have had on 2009.06 using iSCSI (I had a windows VM directly attaching to an iSCSI 4T volume) was solved and back ported to 2009.06 (bug 6794994). -Scott -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
