Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 18:54:30 -0600 From: Graham Allan <allan@physics.umn.edu> To: Michael Sierchio <kudzu@tenebras.com> Cc: Drew Tomlinson <drew@mykitchentable.net>, FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 9 On ESXi 5.5? Message-ID: <20131204005430.GB8508@physics.umn.edu> In-Reply-To: <CAHu1Y70Tcx=t9cXSu%2BsVQaR-8AuhFvyJJfF9FdHzJ0ELcdqPfg@mail.gmail.com> References: <BLU0-SMTP3715B7F52FF0ACE69A856B7B3D50@phx.gbl> <CAHu1Y70Tcx=t9cXSu%2BsVQaR-8AuhFvyJJfF9FdHzJ0ELcdqPfg@mail.gmail.com>
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On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 04:31:00PM -0800, Michael Sierchio wrote: > On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Drew Tomlinson <drew@mykitchentable.net> wrote: > > > I used to use ZFS and like the redundancy it provides. However I've googled > > and there seems to be a lot of posts about ZFS not working well in a virtual > > machine. > > > > Does anyone have any insight on this? Good idea? Bad idea that will bite > > me later? It is most important to me to have a machine that is reliable and > > just runs like my old one did than to do anything fancy. I like a raid1z > > pool because I could lose a disk and not lose data. However I do not want > > to cause problems by using it in a vm since they are so easy to restore from > > backups. > > The only way to use ZFS pools in any reasonable fashion with ESXi is > to present iSCSI targets to the ESXi server from the host that has the > pools. Just my $0.02 ($0.11 adjusted for inflation). I ran FreeBSD with ZFS for a while on a whitebox ESXi (5.1) server at home using raw device mappings to local SATA drives. ESX doesn't support RDM directly for non-SAN type storage but it can be done. Here's the page I used to get it working: http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/ Obviously this does need some degree of caution - it worked just fine for me at home but I don't think I'd stake my job on this setup :-). Also although ZFS seemed perfectly happy with the pass-through RDM devices, you aren't getting 100% raw access to the drives (eg SMART monitoring didn't work). Graham
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