Physical or Virtual iSCSI OS solution?

[LogicWater]

Heya

I have several VMware ESXi servers at work and I wanted to transfer all the local VM images to a new dedicated iSCSI datastore machine. Would a physical or virtual setup (ESXi) be better in performance and reliability? What Operating System would be best for a corporate work environment? OpenSolaris?

 

[jdk]

I think in a production environment you'd want to run on a physical machine. As good as all in one setups are, physical machines will give you better performance. You'll probably want to dedicate about 8GB or more of RAM for ZFS, so that's already a considerable amount of the 32GB limit in ESXi if you're doing an all in one setup.

I'd use Solaris 11.1 personally, I'm sure everyone has a differing opinion on what OS to use.