On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 12:58:04PM +0100, Sašo Kiselkov wrote: > On 11/07/2012 12:39 PM, Tiernan OToole wrote: > > Morning all... > > > > I have a Dedicated server in a data center in Germany, and it has 2 3TB > > drives, but only software RAID. I have got them to install VMWare ESXi and > > so far everything is going ok... I have the 2 drives as standard data > > stores... > > > > But i am paranoid... So, i installed Nexenta as a VM, gave it a small disk > > to boot off and 2 1Tb disks on separate physical drives... I have created a > > mirror pool and shared it with VMWare over NFS and copied my ISOs to this > > share... > > > > So, 2 questions: > > > > 1: If you where given the same hardware, what would you do? (RAID card is > > an extra EUR30 or so a month, which i don't really want to spend, but > > could, if needs be...)
A RAID will only hurt you with all in one. Do you have hardware passthrough with Hetzner (I presume you're with them, from the sound of it) on ESXi? > > 2: should i mirror the boot drive for the VM? > > If it were my money, I'd throw ESXi out the window and use Illumos for > the hypervisor as well. You can use KVM for full virtualization and > zones for light-weight. Plus, you'll be able to set up a ZFS mirror on I'm very interested, as I'm currently working on an all-in-one with ESXi (using N40L for prototype and zfs send target, and a Supermicro ESXi box for production with guests, all booted from USB internally and zfs snapshot/send source). Why would you advise against the free ESXi, booted from USB, assuming your hardware has disk pass-through? The UI is quite friendly, and it's easy to deploy guests across the network. > the data pair and set copies=2 on the rpool if you don't have another > disk to complete the rpool with it. Another possibility, though somewhat > convoluted, is to slice up the disks into two parts: a small OS part and > a large datastore part (e.g. 100GB for the OS, 900GB for the datastore). > Then simply put the OS part in a three-way mirror rpool and the > datastore part in a raidz (plus do a grubinstall on all disks). That > way, you'll be able to sustain a single-disk failure of any one of the > three disks. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss