I have a production setup with Open Indiana 151a, napp-it 0.6r, E3-1230 Xeon quad core CPU, 16 GB ram, five GigE interfaces (4 for iSCSI), one 500 GB SATA2 boot disk, one 64GB SSD for read cache, one 64GB SSD for logs and six 2TB SATA2 drives setup as three 2-disk mirrored vdevs. This is a storage server for a small vSphere Essentials cluster with 3 hosts and about 30 VMs. I/O performance is very good. So far about 25% of the storage is in use. Since many VMs have common operating systems and applications, I was considering deduplication to allow further growth without adding additional hardware (a new enclosure would be required for additional drives). A project to virtualize desktops in that network is also being considered, which would make deduplication even more useful (desktops have more common data than servers). Yet, several forum posts suggest not using deduplication with ZFS, e.g.
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038065317&postcount=17
...ZFS dedup is broken. Never use it until it is fixed....
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038346110&postcount=2589
...Avoid deduplication - only usefull on very special use-cases, even with 16 GB RAM...
Are there successful production deployments of Open Indiana using deduplication? Any reports of major problems?
Else, would the ZFS deduplication in NexentaStor Community Edition be a better choice?
Thanks.
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038065317&postcount=17
...ZFS dedup is broken. Never use it until it is fixed....
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038346110&postcount=2589
...Avoid deduplication - only usefull on very special use-cases, even with 16 GB RAM...
Are there successful production deployments of Open Indiana using deduplication? Any reports of major problems?
Else, would the ZFS deduplication in NexentaStor Community Edition be a better choice?
Thanks.