Hi,
Been reading this site for a while and playing with Nexenta (very impressive) on a HP Microserver. While I'll continue to use them for experimenting I want to put together something to replace my ageing socket 478 based server that handles my domain and storage.
I've recently acquired a Proliant ML110 (latest gen) with a Xeon for a reasonable price. What I propose is to install 4x 1GB disks in the 'hot-swap' bays and boot the system with ESXi from an SD card (slot on motherboard). I then run Nexenta in a VM and pass-thru the 4 drives. This will then provide storage (with all that ZFS goodness) to my main virtual server (the existing one P to V'ed). I can spark up other VM's as required on that host.
So obviously the Nexenta VM can't run from the main 4 drive array so I was thinking of using a basic 2 or 4 port SATA card to handle a couple of small disks (the 2 remaining SATA ports are spoken for). Maybe in RAID 1 for a bit of resilience. Any suggestions? Are the commonplace Silicon Image cards any good for this purpose?
The other thing I'm unsure of is ZIL/L2ARC possible/worthwhile with Nexenta in a VM? How would it be setup?
Thanks,
Paul
Been reading this site for a while and playing with Nexenta (very impressive) on a HP Microserver. While I'll continue to use them for experimenting I want to put together something to replace my ageing socket 478 based server that handles my domain and storage.
I've recently acquired a Proliant ML110 (latest gen) with a Xeon for a reasonable price. What I propose is to install 4x 1GB disks in the 'hot-swap' bays and boot the system with ESXi from an SD card (slot on motherboard). I then run Nexenta in a VM and pass-thru the 4 drives. This will then provide storage (with all that ZFS goodness) to my main virtual server (the existing one P to V'ed). I can spark up other VM's as required on that host.
So obviously the Nexenta VM can't run from the main 4 drive array so I was thinking of using a basic 2 or 4 port SATA card to handle a couple of small disks (the 2 remaining SATA ports are spoken for). Maybe in RAID 1 for a bit of resilience. Any suggestions? Are the commonplace Silicon Image cards any good for this purpose?
The other thing I'm unsure of is ZIL/L2ARC possible/worthwhile with Nexenta in a VM? How would it be setup?
Thanks,
Paul