ESXi as baremetal host or OI?

[soundscribe]

I'd like to build a NAS/SAN/VM host and am really grateful for all the collected knowledge I've seen here. Already I think I'll be able to avoid some fatal mistakes (e.g., getting a MB/CPU without VT-d support).

I'm developing my overall requirements, but essentially need a quiet, 4-6TB NAS/SAN/VM host. Primary usage will be for media serving to a couple of clients and light VM hosting.

Is the current thinking to use ESXi on the bare metal, pass through the disk controller directly to OI, run OI as a VM and share back the zfs storage as iSCSI (or NFS I suppose) to the VMs?

Or is it "better" to run OI on the bare metal and use Virtualbox on top of OI? Better meaning more stable/faster/easier to maintain/etc....

Any other hypervisors that should be considered? I've worked with Xen in the past and it wasn't the friendliest... I'd prefer an all open source solution, but ESXi looks like the best choice at this point.

 

[mmmmmdonuts]

It's much better to use the ESXi and create OI as a VM, and have the other VM's run off of NFS (recommend this method) or iSCSI, than to run it in virtualbox, especially if you want the VM's to run near native speed. Have you checked out Gea's site & Napp-it? He has two tutorials that are a must read. http://www.napp-it.org/manuals/index.html

This is the way I have running at my house and it works excellent.

 

[soundscribe]

I do run Napp-it now -- just getting started actually.

I'll check out the link you provided.

Thanks for the response.

 

[GaryM]

I know this is an old thread, but for anyone just starting out, I find that Openindiana runs better in an ESXi 5.x VM compared to running it as a single bare metal application, on my server grade hardware.