Hi,
I've been designing a new storage + virtualisation solution for my home over the last few months and am very interested in the features ZFS provides.
However I don't like not being able to add a drive to an existing ZFS pool and have been looking for a way round that issue... I believe I may have found it.
Here's the idea :
VMware ESXi boots off a USB stick and then starts a linux storage VM with a RAID card running the IT firmware (in passthrough).
The linux VM would be running mdraid + LVM and have a large LUN exported via iSCSI to a second VM running opensolaris.
The OpenSolaris VM would then mount the LUN via iSCSI and format it with ZFS.
The idea is that I'd then be able to benefit from ZFS dedup, compression, snapshots, etc, and still be able to increase the storage size by resizing the LUN which ZFS uses.
My understanding is that ZFS would then automatically expand in order to use all the available space.
Does this sound right to you ? Has anyone ever tried this ?
What sort of performance hit do you think I should expect from this solution vs a standard ZFS setup (in VMware) ?
Regards,
John
I've been designing a new storage + virtualisation solution for my home over the last few months and am very interested in the features ZFS provides.
However I don't like not being able to add a drive to an existing ZFS pool and have been looking for a way round that issue... I believe I may have found it.
Here's the idea :
VMware ESXi boots off a USB stick and then starts a linux storage VM with a RAID card running the IT firmware (in passthrough).
The linux VM would be running mdraid + LVM and have a large LUN exported via iSCSI to a second VM running opensolaris.
The OpenSolaris VM would then mount the LUN via iSCSI and format it with ZFS.
The idea is that I'd then be able to benefit from ZFS dedup, compression, snapshots, etc, and still be able to increase the storage size by resizing the LUN which ZFS uses.
My understanding is that ZFS would then automatically expand in order to use all the available space.
Does this sound right to you ? Has anyone ever tried this ?
What sort of performance hit do you think I should expect from this solution vs a standard ZFS setup (in VMware) ?
Regards,
John