ZFS or Openfiler or Vail

[Deleted User 298457]

Any suggestions?

6x 1TB drives, 250gb VM pool drive - using ESXi. I have vt-d available to me.

I am passing the disk controller to the VM.

Do I use ZFS (OpenIndiana) and present iSCSI to Vail? Or do I install WHS and let that deal with the storage?

 

[Deleted User 298457]

Correct -> 250GB is going for VM storage (ESXi is on a usb) and the controller with the 1TB drives on is being passed over to whatever storage VM I chose.

I was happy with WHSv1 to be honest, in the sense that it let me specify from my pooled drives which ones I wanted to backup. However it would be good to sacrifice 1 of the drives to protect all of the data.

I can then run WHS 2011 on the 250GB vmstore, or pass it another drive, for crucial backups from the storage server.

I am now also investigating SnapRAID or similar.

FreeNAS is still viable.

I think ZFS/OpenIndiana is out as I want to add new drives to the pool as and when I see fit.

 

[Deleted User 298457]

VM's are going to be run from the local datastore (250gb 7200rpm drive)

ZFS is simply for media files

 

[Deleted User 298457]

The thing I am having trouble getting my head around is you mentioning the trial period ending and that your servers have their free license. As soon as you register by inputting the license key, the trial period becomes null in void and the extra features you had in the trial period that are not part of the license you have just registered are turned off.

If you are on the trial then it will say evaluation as it does in the screen shot above. If it is registered with the free license it will say something different (I will post a screen shot when I get home tonight).

RB

The trial period end is when the licenses is entered. This is the point at which the passthrough became unavailable.

does it really matter whether it ended then the license was entered or whether the license is entered within 60 days? Same end result surely.

Here is a video of me enabling pass through with a licensed 'free' copy of ESXi 5.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzcWd9veVuQ

You can see as soon as I click configuration it says licensed.

 

[Deleted User 298457]

Just to clarify the confusion earlier, here's my set of screenshots.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23261050/license.png <-licensed

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23261050/NICs.png <- available Intel PRo1000 adapter not bound to any vSwitch
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23261050/ESX Passthrough.png <- "Passthrough not supported" despite it working on the same hardware that is on a non-free license and it did work before I put the free license key in.

Not sure why, but clearly my free license doesn't do what yours does.

Are you sure your host even supports pass through? On the main screen it should say Direct I/O:

 

[Deleted User 298457]

Strange, please do keep the ESXi thread updated with your findings. Would love to know why this has happened.

Yep, sorry DLockers. To answer your original question, I would go with WHS 2011 and drive pool for now unless you particularly wish to explore the various other tech like iSCSI/ZFS etc. I find it does me very well.

RB

I forgot to update this.

I'm running Open Indiana and Napp-it to give me ZFS. Working great at the minute, dead simple.

Practised a drive failure and yanked a drive, silvered, all data fine and redundant again

Edit: Using WHS 2011 for SSTP VPN, backing up PC's and PS3 Media/SABNZB tasks.