Is OI really the right storage solution for me?

[LibertySyclone]

I am on the final stretch of building myself an all in one box, Basically just need the HBA and a Norco shelf.

Am I missing any other OS/Distro/JBOD that I should consider?

This box(s) will be taking the place of everything I have today in my rack:
P4 powered -ClearOS
i5 -WHS2011 w/7TB of storage (will NOT use this OS ever again)
Dell PE 1950 -ESX lab (1TB of DAS+ 1TB internal)


And this is where my dilemma sits, Storage. I loved WHS v1 because of drive extender, although I could deal without all the other bugs. I would like to have that simplicity back. I have had a OI vm running for testing use for ~6 months now. I haven't really had any major issues, it was easy to get up and running with the exception of Time machine backups. But this hasn't been a primary place for storage, just for testing.

I have thought about rolling with a Win8 license and using storage places as the write perf doesnt really matter THAT much to me, however that would hose me using my storage for my VMs from esx right? (no NTFS datastores?)

OI questions
How hard is it to span out volumes over multiple RZ groups?
Can I easily add another Raid group of different sized drives?
How long does it take to reslliver an existing to LARGE drives? 2-4TB

Planned AIO specs:
HP DL360 G6 dual x5560 32GB RAM, IBM HBA, Intel dual NIC card
Norco 24 drive shelf taking the 7 WD black 1TB drives from WHS to start

Always on VMs:
ClearOS or PFsense
Storage OS
AD environment including exchange, this is 90% for my learning/keeping up with M$ changes. 10% managing my grandfathers small business email. No more than 5 users. (wouldn't mind storage being able to use LDAP for permissions)

Random on VMs:
1-3 Linux VMs
1-4 Windows VMs

Other PCs in the house
Mac-read/write
Windows 7-8: read/write
Linux HTPCs- read only

 

[monkizzle]

How hard is it to span out volumes over multiple RZ groups?
If you mean adding another raidz vdev to an existing pool than it is very easy. especially with napp-it.

Timemachine I got working very easily too not sure where you ran into a problem with that.

I gave whs with drive bender a try for a little bit but ultimately came back to oi + napp it. Well now im on omnios + nappit.

I have esxi installed on ssd, omnios vm on same ssd and passthrough perc6ir to omnios. all my other vm's use nfs datastore as their storage location. OmniOS starts up first and other VM's start after that. Works perfectly.

 

[spazoid]

I'm sure you've thought about this, but make sure you have licence(s) for that 2-way ESXi setup. VMware has changed their licencing quite a bit lately.