6TB + ZFS + ESXi5

Look at the Gea 'all in one' thread. And/or go to napp-it.org - he has complete instructions there.
 
DlStreamnet said:
I have just purchased a Xeon 1230, 16GB Ram & an Intel DQ67SWB.

I plan on running WHS 2011 and a few other basic VM's (PfSense).

Is there a guide/tutorial for completing this task? I'm concerned about how I present to the ZFS operating system (Zfsguru?) the actual drives. I will be using vt-d passthrough and the on board SATA controllers.
Click to expand...

just try to help a bit :) -> http://www.napp-it.org/napp-it/all-in-one/index_en.html
 
Assuming you use 'auto-start/auto-stop', you need to have the solaris VM as the first VM to start and need to give it plenty of time to get running. If you install vmware tools in it, you can check the box that says 'continue when vmware tools are running' (or whatever the name is.) One thing I discovered: since the VMs are hosted on the solaris VM, the other VMs will show in inventory as 'unavailable' and greyed out (names are not even available, IIRC.) That is no big deal if you use NFS for the datastore, since it seems to wait plenty long enough for the NFS server to start up. I do NOT recommend using an iSCSI datastore, since when I tried that (maybe things have changed since ESXi 4.1 which is when I had tried iSCSI), the boot code in ESXi seemed to give up more quickly, so the other VMs were never started and I had to manually rescan the iSCSI datastore.
 
Well, you need a sata controller for the local datastore for the solaris VM, so it's really up to you. When I was running an all in one, I put ESXi on a USB stick and a cheap laptop drive on the mobo sata controller for the solaris VM. ESXi does almost no I/O with the non-datastore filesystem, so a USB stick is fine.
 
Oh, I misread your first post. I thought you already had two controllers. Unfortunately you cannot use a USB stick as a datastore. ESXi does not support that. You can get a pretty cheap 1-2 port sata controller for the local datastore...
 
Or you could get an M1015 off ebay for under $100. Get 2 forward breakout cables and you can connect 8 sata drives to the passed-in m1015, and put the local datastore off the onboard sata. That is a popular option.
 
No idea, sorry :( For what it's worth, OI or some other solaris VM is not going to do much writing to the root pool, so performance is not important.
 
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