2011-10-16 4:14, Tim Cook wrote:
Quite frankly your choice in blade chassis was a horrible design
decision. From your description of its limitations it should never be
the building block for a vmware cluster in the first place. I would
start by rethinking that decision instead of trying to pound a round
ZFS peg into a square hole.
--Tim
Point taken ;)
Alas, quite often, it is not us engineers that make designs but a mix of
bookkeeping folks and vendor marketing.
The MFSYS boxes are pushed by Intel or its partners as a good VMWare
farm in a box - and for that it works well. As long as storage capacity
on board (4.2TB with basic 300Gb drives, or more with larger ones, or
even expanded with extSAS) is sufficient, the chassis is not "a building
block" of the VMWare cluster. It is the cluster, all of it. The box has
many HA features, including dual-link SAS, redundant storage and
networking controllers, and stuff. It is just not very expansible. But
relatively cheap, which as I said is an important factor for many.
For our company as software service vendors it is also suitable - the
customer buys almost a preconfigured appliance, plugs in power and an
ethernet uplink, and things magically work. This requires little to no
skill from customers' IT people (won't always say they are "admins") to
maintain, and there are no intricate external connections to break off...
For relatively small offices, 20 external gigabit ports of two managed
switch modules can also become the networking core for the deployment site.
Thanks,
//Jim
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