[OmniOS-discuss] Omnios as a zfs storage server under esxi 5.1

[Dan Swartzendruber]

> Hi all,
>
> Next month, we need to deploy an omnios virtual machine to act as storage
> server under esxi 5.1. We can not use bare metal server, and I know that
> is
> a problem.
>
> We are thinking in disable zil. Is it recommended when omnios is installed
> as a vm?? And we can not use pci passthrough esxi feature due to vmotion
> and HA features enabled in these esxi servers.
>
> Any recommendations about how to configure this vm?
>
> At first stage we can allocate 8 gb of ram and 4 vcpus. And wr need to
> manage 5 tb of data with snapshots and maybr compression in certain zfs
> volumes.

I'm not sure I understand your comment about HA/vmotion.  If this is going
to be a storage appliance, it will be locked to one host anyway, so the
pci passthrough restrictions should not concern you.  Or am I
misunderstanding something?  On the other note, if you are running a ZFS
virtual appliance, I would not worry about disabling sync, since the
likelihood of a bug that only crashes the appliance as opposed to the
entire host seems small.  I am willing to take that chance, since I do
hourly replications of my guests.