For some reason Thomas Weyell’s blog doesn’t get as much attention as it should! Thomas posted a cool article about using Solaris with ZFS as an NFS target for your ESX hosts:
Today I will write about a great subject which means a lot to me.
I read so often that people will use NFS as a cheap and easy shared storage for VMware ESX.
Conceptional! If you want to test something in a test environment, you need cheap storage or what ever you can use NFS. But why so much pepole will use NFS on Linux? There is not one benefit against NFS on ZFS with Solaris 10/Nevada. So lets use a great protocol from the same vendor who develop a very great filesystem and operating system. Lets checkout NFS and ZFS with Solaris…
So check out the complete article here download Solaris(it’s free you guys!!!) and test it out! Did I say it’s free?!! Cool stuff Thomas,
Thanks Duncan for the comment!
It’s been over a year now since we put our test environment on Solaris Nevada b58 using ZFS over software iSCSI. We only had a couple hiccups with Solaris that we attributed to the immature iSCSI implement. Basically the iSCSI service would get out of sync with ESX and would need to be stopped/started.
We switched over to NFS a few months ago and presented a second 2TB ZFS formatted NFS share to ESX. This has been working out even better. Performance and reliability have been just fine. The ease of setup and administration is effortless. The newer Nevada builds are even better and I highly recommended this setup for a low cost testbed.
We have 3 ESXi servers running about 10 VMs (4 large SQL databases 250GB+) and no issues that we can think of. Snapshots work fine too. We haven’t experienced the slowness people have complained of with NFS and snapshots.
jonatj
Jonathan, if you still have the same setup or the specifications, I would love to use them to setup and test bed environment using the same setting.
Thanks.