NAS configuration for ESXi

[TeeJayHoward]

I've got a bunch of 3TB drives I want to use as simple storage. In the past, I've installed Solaris 11 as my OS, created a RAIDZ, and shared them out via NFS and SMB. It worked well enough, but I want to play with different technologies. So I've got an 840 Pro plugged in that I want to use as an iSCSI target for my ESXi VMs. I'm hoping that a single SSD will provide better IOPS than six spindles. The only thing on the SSD will be the VMs.

My questions:
1) Is Solaris 11 a decent OS to use to present the drive to ESXi? It won't be slower than a NFS share would, right?
2) If I understand it correctly, presenting the drive via iSCSI to ESXi will allow ESXi to format it, which means my Solaris NAS will not be able to view the contents. However, I'd like to have a cron job set up to back the VMs up daily to the spindles in the same enclosure. Easy to do with a NFS share. How would I do this with iSCSI?

While I've got the experts on the line, I'm learning more about VMware's product line. Is there anything wrong with running vCSA on the same hosts being managed by vCSA?

 

[danswartz]

I would stick with NFS then. You can have a separate backup spindle as a different pool. Download a ksh script called zrep that does incremental replication. You'd set it up to replicate your nfs dataset to the backup pool in a cron job. Also, for your case, I would avoid raidz* - set up raid10. Much better random IOPs, which is what you will see from a workload made up of multiple esxi VMs. Then use that ssd as a l2arc read cache. I have 16GB on my omnios filer, and I hit in the ARC 95% and much of the rest goes to the L2ARC. I would avoid solaris 11 due to being closed source. Go with omnios...