Hardware RAID vs ZFS Storage

J

jsdds

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Jun 5, 2011
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Hi Guys,

I’d really appreciate some opinions and help. I’m upgrading from a Windows Home Server V1 installation which is mainly used as a media server (TV shows, movies, and music storage). I was going to do an ESXi 4.1 machine with Small Business Server 2011 Essentials as a virtual machine. (I’ll also have a Ubuntu VM and a firewall virtual appliance on this same machine.) Machine Specs:

Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCM-F
RAM: Kingston 16Gb ECC
Processor: Sandy Spring socket 1155 E3 1230
Raid Card #1: 3Ware 9650SE 4-Port
4x 1Tb drives attached
Raid Card #2: Areca 1880i 8-Port
6x 2Tb drives attached
Also available: 90Gb Vertex 2 SSD
40Gb 5900-rpm 2.5” laptop drive
8Gb USB drive

Since I have a couple of nice hardware raid cards, I was planning of configuring the 9650 as a RAID10 yielding a 2Tb Lun. The 1880i was to be RAID6 yielding 4x2Tb luns. ESXi was to be installed on an 8Gb USB drive and Small Business Server and the other virtual machines on the 3Ware 2Tb RAID10 9650SE. The 1880i attached drives were to be used for data.

So here is my dilemma and question:

Given my hardware Raid cards, would it be beneficial to do an all-in-one with Solaris 11 Express managing one or more ZFS data pools? (The RAID cards would be passed through to Solaris and fed back to ESXi as NFS storage or just shared using SMB by windows clients in the home network. ESXi would be installed on the 8Gb USB drive, Solaris 11 Express on the 40Gb laptop drive, and all other virtual machines on a ZFS file system.

Possible benefits:
Better data protection by virtue of ZFS
Larger data pools (ESXi uses 2Tb luns)
Ability to take snapshots (I’ll be using the free version of ESXi which does not support VM backups.)
Ability to use my 90Gb Vertex 2 SSD as a cache drive to increase performance

I’m ready to configure my hardware but I just can’t decide which way to go. Thanks in advance for all comments and opinions.
 
I would definitely go the all in one route. Although I would go with OI rather than SE11, just because you are not going to be getting any bugfixes or anything with SE11 (unless you are paying for a support contract?)
 
danswartz thanks. I'm installing a VM of OpenIndiana right now.

OldSchool, thanks for the insight. I had been using both cards as passthrough cards in windows home server without problems and the 9650 card passes through by default and the 1880i has explicit designation for pass through in the bios so I think they would be OK. If anyone has had any experience with these cards using ZFS, I'd appreciate input.

Thanks again!
 
As long as you can make sure the raid card doesn't take drives out of service if they go bad or have issues, you should be okay. Be nicer if the card(s) allowed you to flash with non-raid firmware, but that may not be an option.
 
To use ZFS with raid cards can problematic. ZFS protects your data, but it can only protect your data if there is no hw-raid card, because such cards disturbs ZFS. If you insist on using hw-raid cards, then you have lost much of the superior ZFS protection. Read about hw-raid and ZFS here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_Integrity


And I am not such that running an operating system with ZFS, virtualized is the best thing to do. I would not trust virtualized OS. Because there were issues earlier with someone running OpenSolaris ontop Windows XP in VirtualBox. That guy lost all his data. It turned out that VirtualBox did not obey flush commands (?) so ZFS thought everything was fine, but VB ignored ZFS commands. Therefore he lost all his data. Now you can tune VB to obey those write flush cache commands. But still. If your data is valuable, then I would be cautious.

ZFS can do magic, yes. But it can not do magic if you run hw-raid cards. Maybe it can not do it's magic if you run it virtualized, because ESXI might disturb ZFS? I dont know. But be cautios.
 
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