Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:51:30 -0500 From: dweimer <dweimer@dweimer.net> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Freebsd iSCSI client =?UTF-8?Q?=3F?= Message-ID: <da5f486482b2223ae969989003f087a3@dweimer.net> In-Reply-To: <20121029132939.9540.qmail@joyce.lan> References: <20121029132939.9540.qmail@joyce.lan>
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On 2012-10-29 08:29, John Levine wrote:
> I'm trying to set up a freebsd image under vmware, but I need more
> disk
> space than the vmware hosts offer. So the guy who runs the hosting
> place
> suggests getting a 1U disk server and using iSCSI over gigabit
> Ethernet
> so I can build zfs volumes from the iSCSI disks.
>
> Poking around, the reports say that FreeBSD is a pretty good iSCSI
> server in such forms as freenas, but a lousy iSCSI client, with the
> first problem being that that kludges are required to get iSCSI
> volumes mounted early enough in the boot process for ZFS to find
> them.
> Is this still the case in FreeBSD 9?
>
> I'd rather not use NFS, since the remote disks have mysql databases,
> and mysql and NFS are not friends.
>
> An alternative is to mount the iSCSI under vmware, so zfs sees them
> as
> normal disks. Anyone tried that?
>
> TIA,
> John
I don't have an answer for you at the moment, but I can tell you that I
just started a new server build this morning with the intent of using it
as an iSCSI client and running ZFS on the drive. In my case however its
going to be a file server that doesn't have very much heavy I/O, with
the intention of using compression on the ZFS file set. In my case a
script ran after start up to mount the drive would work if it fails. I
will let you know what I find out, server is in the middle of a
buildworld to get it updated to the p4 release.
Yes you can mount as a drive through VMware and use ZFS just fine, I
have done a lot of recent tests using ZFS as the boot volume under
VMware. This new server will be my first production server to use what I
have learned from those tests, as its system drive mounted through
VMware (ESX 4.1) and is booting from ZFS. Once the install of the
buildworld is complete I will add a 150G ZFS data set on our HP Lefthand
Networks SAN, run some tests and let you know the outcome of them.
--
Thanks,
Dean E. Weimer
http://www.dweimer.net/
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