> Also, most of the big name vendors have a USB or SD > option for booting ESXi. I believe this is the 'ESXi > Embedded' flavor vs. the typical 'ESXi Installable' > that we're used to. I don't think it's a bad idea at > all. I've got a not-quite-production system I'm > booting off USB right now, and while it takes a > really long time to boot it does work. I think I like > the SD card option better though.
i need 4gb extra space for the Nexenta zfs storage server. and it should not be as slow as a usb stick or management via web-gui is painfull slow. > > What I am wondering is whether this is really worth > it. Are you planning to share the storage out to > other VM hosts, or are all the VMs running on the > host using the 'local' storage? I know we like ZFS > vs. traditional RAID and volume management, and I get > that being able to boot any ZFS-capable OS is good > for disaster recovery, but what I don't get is how > this ends up working better than a larger dedicated > ZFS system and a storage network. Is it cheaper over > several hosts? Are you getting better performance > through e.g. the vmxnet3 adapter and NFS than you > would just using the disks directly? > mainly the storage is used via NFS for local vm's. but we share the nfs datastores also via cifs to have a simple move/ clone/ copy or backup. we also replicate datastores at least once per day to a second machine via incremental zfs send. we have or plan the same system on all of our esxi machines. each esxi has its own local san-like storage server. (i do not like a to have one big san-storage to be a single point of failure + high speed san cabling. so we have 4 esxi server, each with its own virtualized zfs-storage server + three common used backup systems - connected via 10Gbe VLAN). we formerly had separate storage and esxi server but with pass-through we could integrate the two and reduce our hardware that could fail and cabling at a rate of 50%. gea -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
