ZFS/VMware guru needed

K

Kentster

n00b
Joined
Nov 23, 2010
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2
Greetings,

I'm looking for a ZFS/VMware consultant to help me develop a proof of concept architecture that will eventually evolve into a standard for our production deployments. I'm looking to move on this rather quickly so if anyone may be interested drop me a PM so we can discuss the matter further.
 
You want to use ZFS for production? Looks like it has been abandoned by Oracle.
 
danman said:
You think there is a future in those?
Click to expand...

Even with all the non-sense of the NetApp lawsuit against Sun, now Oracle. I have not lost faith in ZFS. As long as it's made available in Oracle Solaris 10 and admins are using it, it will have a future.
 
danman said:
You think there is a future in those?
Click to expand...

Considering that we have a few million dollars worth of hardware..yes. For a home user ZFS availability might be a little shaky until third party companies learn to deal with the new Oracle Solaris Express stuff, but for corp accounts with support contracts, ZFS will be around and have support for a long time.

Solaris 8 was released in 2000. It is still supported (and we still have a few Solaris 8 boxes in production).
 
Virtualizing ZFS may not work as well. You'll virtualize both the storage (I/O) and the networking, so expect huge bottlenecks. It's also very dangerous, assuming VMware ignores 'flush buffer' commands which guarantee data integrity by forcing atomic writes. I'm not sure but i know by default Virtualbox ignores these requests. This can mean a corrupt array and basically wastes most ZFS benefits.

Virtualizing using Xen may be the 'pro' solution, where you get access to the REAL HBA controller without emulation, to the REAL network interface without emulation, etc. But i have no experience with Xen other than some simple demonstrations, not sure if it's suitable to you.

I also don't know VMware very well. But i would thread carefully. Is there no way to make your ZFS box run without virtualization? Is running FreeBSD with Jails a possibility?
 
Have you looked into virtualizing onto HP's Virtual SAN Appliance [VSA]? I'm moving some of my best storage hardware onto that, and I have several lefthand appliances I use for all my OS's. I am really pleased with the performance, cost, and scalability. The network RAID redundancy is also very sexy for uptime and screen shots. It's also designed with ESX high availability in mind, which is part of my whole server-room upgrade process.
 
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