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

[C. L. Martinez]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Günther Alka <alka at hfg-gmuend.de> wrote:
> First of all, a virtualized SAN is not a problem but a good idea on a lot of
> use cases unless you can supply the same CPU, RAM and disk recommendations
> like you would do on on real hardware. It is also not a problem, that you
> cannot do vmotion with your SAN-VM (How would you vmotion your physical
> disks??)
>
> But you must provide:
> - real hardware access to controller and disks (needs pass-through/vt-d) for
> your SAN VM OmniOS
> - assign enough RAM for caching (Arc-cache), the more the faster
> - be not CPU limited
>
> If you need a ZIL or better disable sync write depends on use case.
> If you build an All-In-One (ESXi with virtualized SAN), all your guests go
> down together with your SAN,
> so mostly a ZIL costs money and performance but cannot improve security.
>
> You should also trythe ESXI highspeed VMXnet3 network drivers (unless you
> find problems with them like some others)
> If you intend to use compression, use LZ4 (with newest OmnoOS stable with
> bugfixes for LZ4)
>
> Have you read my manuals (hope they are helpful)?
> http://www.napp-it.org/doc/downloads/all-in-one.pdf and
> http://napp-it.org/doc/ESXi-OmniOS_Installation_HOWTO_en.pdf
>
> Gea
>
>

Many thanks Günther and Dan for your answers. But still I have some doubts:

a) I can't assign real hardware access to this VM, but i can assign
disks using RDM.
b) How can I calculate how many Arc-cache do I need??
c) Is it safe to use vmxnet3 nic driver for this production
environment?? I prefer to use e1000 driver f the performance does not
goes down.

I have read your manuals Günther, and they are very clear to
accomplish an OmniOS install and some performance tips. However, I am
very concerned about the issue of calculating the Arc-cache and if it
is safe (from a point of view of data integrity) to disable the ZIL in
a virtualization environment.