Chewie71
Cadet
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2012
- Messages
- 9
I've been brainstorming about FreeNAS and VMware and have thought about offering user home directories (shared via CIFS,AFP, NFS) through a FreeNAS VM.
The underlying storage is FC connected enterprise grade SAN. I cannot directly connect individual hard disks to a VM. So there's several other ways I could do it.
I'm not positive, but I don't think I gain anything from ZFS in my case. The SAN has dual everything, power, controllers, FC switches and paths. The arrays are RAID5 with hot spares to spare. The SAN performance is blazing fast. I think option 3 is the best way, but maybe I'm missing something in my thinking? ZFS over VMDK (or even raw) over RAID5 seems like way to much overhead....I'm not even positive ZFS can take advantage of it's feature set without access to the raw physical disks.
Can someone tell me if I'm wrong?
My goal is to find a way to easily provision storage for users and be flexible about how that storage is delivered to their desktop or device. FreeNAS might work for me if I can figure out the most efficient way to design it in VMware.....and if it can scale and perform under high load....potentially thousands of connections.
Thanks,
Matt
The underlying storage is FC connected enterprise grade SAN. I cannot directly connect individual hard disks to a VM. So there's several other ways I could do it.
- VMDKs: Create SAN LUNs, create a VMDK from each LUN, mount each LUN as a disk in FreeNAS, create a vdev from these and put them in a ZFS pool.
- RAW: Create SAN LUNs, raw map the LUNs to the VM (which would look more like a physical disk I think), create a vdev from these and put them in a ZFS pool.
- NO ZFS: Instead of using ZFS, just create some VMDK storage and use UFS volumes in FreeNAS.
I'm not positive, but I don't think I gain anything from ZFS in my case. The SAN has dual everything, power, controllers, FC switches and paths. The arrays are RAID5 with hot spares to spare. The SAN performance is blazing fast. I think option 3 is the best way, but maybe I'm missing something in my thinking? ZFS over VMDK (or even raw) over RAID5 seems like way to much overhead....I'm not even positive ZFS can take advantage of it's feature set without access to the raw physical disks.
Can someone tell me if I'm wrong?
My goal is to find a way to easily provision storage for users and be flexible about how that storage is delivered to their desktop or device. FreeNAS might work for me if I can figure out the most efficient way to design it in VMware.....and if it can scale and perform under high load....potentially thousands of connections.
Thanks,
Matt
